"More is more. Less is less. Twice as much is good, too. Not enough is
bad, and enough is never enough unless it's just right."
- The Tick
"Everybody who's vested is too busy lighting cigars and tipping hookers
to comment."
- anonymous editor at Time Warner, on their merger with AOL
"Don't just stand there with a confused look on your face. Unleash the
power of the Internet with a confused look on your face."
- add for iPlanet (Sun/Netscape Alliance)
"We are completely network agnostic. In fact, we would invest in
broadband carrier pigeons if someone could find a way for them to
deliver two megabits into the home."
- Bruce Lynn, Microsoft
"The Net was a full-employment act for Generation X."
- Jonathan Van Decimeter
"There's so much publicity surrounding the Internet and the New Economy
right now that it's easy to fool yourself into believing that
traditional principles of business and investing are no longer relevant.
But the basic truths about the market have not changed, the most
important of which is
that the market knows more than you do."
- James Surowiecki, in Slate
"And however far you look ahead, however good you are, the one thing for
sure is that you'll be wrong."
- Rajiv Gupta
"If something can't go on, it won't."
- Herbert Stein's law
"I feel at least some satisfaction that our market analysis was right.
But I'd feel better if we were rich."
- J. F. Kassis
"[Their] options are so far under water that they'll never see sunlight
without getting the bends."
- Jimmy Guterman, in the Industry Standard
"The best thing you can say about today is the closing bell worked when
they rung it."
- eSchwab commentary on another rough day on Wall St.
"Remember, options don't vest for the unemployed."
- Carl Steadman
"I haven't gone to another startup. I've gone mad."
- ibid
"Christopher Columbus was a failure. His business model did not pan out:
no western route to Asia, hardly any gold, abandonment by his investors,
not much of an enduring first-mover advantage for Spain . . . but he
fucking discovered America."
- Kurt Andersen, on dot.com pioneers/failure
"One needs to be ready to abandon ship and launch another. We fail every
day. We simply don't tell anyone and thereby maintain a certain aura of
credibility."
- Mr. Blue (aka Garrison Keillor)
"...just go live your life the best you can. And don't feel gloomy about
being gloomy. If you're going to be unhappy, be unhappy in some original
and witty way so you can get some pleasure out of it."
- ibid
"Perplext no more with Human or Divine,
To-morrow's tangle to the winds resign,
And lose your fingers in the tresses of
The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine.
When You and I behind the Veil are past,
Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast."
- Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat
"I can't believe that we would lie in our graves
Dreaming of things that we might have been."
- Dave Mathews
"When you're dead, you're all dead."
- J. B. Watson
"One of the many things I dislike about being a grown-up is the
compulsion to have a purpose in life . . . Once you've established
yourself as a more or less properly functioning adult, it is nearly
impossible to just go somewhere and screw off."
- Michael Lewis
"And while we're at it, let's agree to be sillier among strangers in
elevators."
- Alecia Swasy, in the New York Times
"In the morally berserk universe of the Clintons, in which allegations
of perjury are 'compartmentalized' without shame, Washington has lost
its bearings. There is so much ill will in large measure because there
can be no shared sense of the common good in an environment dominated by
such utter mendacity and ethical squalor."
- John Ellis, in the Washington Post
"By Tuesday, December 15, after Clinton's last-ditch nonapology had
bombed like all its predecessors, every headline had every waverer
deciding for impeachment after all. On Wednesday afternoon, the
president announced that Saddam Hussein was, shockingly enough, not
complying with the UN inspectorate. And the cruise missiles took wing
again."
- Christopher Hitchens, No One Left to Lie to
"No blood for blowjobs."
- sign protesting Clinton's war crimes
"Still, McCain's masterful campaign has tapped into the nation's
strongest desire at the end of the Clinton era, the desire to take a
shower."
- George Will
"My plan to put Social Security in an ironclad lockbox has gotten a lot
of attention recently, and I'm glad about that. But I'm afraid that it's
overshadowing some vitally important proposals. For instance, I'll put
Medicaid in a walk-in closet. I'll put the Community Reinvestment Act in
a secured gym locker. I'll put NASA funding in a hermetically sealed
Ziploc bag."
- Al Gore
"A vote for Al Gore is a vote for the complete annihilation of all
possible worlds."
- Crispin Sartwell, "A New
Refutation of the Very Possibility of Al Gore"
"If I'm elected president I will immediately sign an executive order
disarming every single guard on
Capitol Hill—until Congress fully restores your right to carry a gun."
- Harry Browne, Libertarian candidate for President
About the last thing we could have imagined a Republican presidential
nominee saying, even a few years ago: "I welcome gay Americans into my
campaign."
- George W. Bush
"George Bush is not ready to be president of the United States."
- Joseph Lieberman
"I never expected to get his vote anyway."
- George Bush
". . . and so on first opening a book or looking into a manuscript I
listen for the sound of a human voice. I think of all writing—whether
cast in the form of the historical essay, the scientific treatise, or
the minimalist poem—as an attmpt to tell a story. Some stories are more
complicated or beautiful than others. Some stories are immortal; many
are false or incoherent. Homer told a story and so did Einstein; so do
General Motors and Donald Duck. But no matter how well or how poorly we
manage the narrative, we are all engaged in the same enterprise, all of
us caught up in the making of metaphors, all of us seeking evocations or
representations of what we can recognize as appropriately human."
- Lewis H. Lapham, 150th anniversary Harpers
"The weird thing is that every time I've been to see people like poets,
who write about flowers and trees and all this affirmation of life and
the soul, and this upbeat, uplifting stuff, they're always really
miserable bastards. They're always really fucking miserable depressed
bastards."
- Irvine Welsh
"Someone to cling to me
Stay with me with me, right or wrong
Someone to sing to me
Some little samba song . . .
Oh yes—that would be so nice"
- Wanda De Sah & Sergio Mendes, "So Nice (Samba De
Verao)" [from "BossaNovaVille" (Ultra-Lounge Volume 14)]
"The heart is so easily mocked, believing that the sun can rise twice,
or that roses bloom because we want them to."
- Jeanette Winterson
"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it
flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."
- Matt Groening
"She had the power of inspiring love, almost anywhere. Forget about
making strong men weep. Seven-stone pacifists shouldered their way
through street riots to be home in case she called. Family men abandoned
sick children to wait in the rain outside her flat. Semi-literate
builders and bankers sent her sonnet sequences . . . And the thing with
her (what was it with her?), the thing with her was that she had
to receive this love and send it back in opposite form, not just
cancelled but murdered."
- Martin Amis, London Fields
"Yes, have it your own way, make love and get it over. We're in hell; my
turn will come."
- Sartre, "No Exit"
"Myself, speaking as a guy, I feel there's a lot to be said for
hand-holding, nuzzling, the arm around the shoulder, etc. Occasionally,
I'm willing to get out the harnesses, the tiki torches, the Saran Wrap,
the Mazola, the wheelbarrow full of mud and the Mary Poppins video, and
thrill my partner, but more and more, as time goes by, I'm satisfied
with companionship. But we are simple country people, so what do we
know?"
- Mr. Blue
"That's one of the tragedies of this life—the men who are most in need
of a beating are always enormous."
- John D. Hackensacker, The Palm Beach Story
"The Matrix may tell us that to conquer the false face of everyday
reality we have to look like Keanu Reeves, carry guns, and kick the crap
out of Hugo Weaving, but that sounds a lot easier than losing weight and
finding a new job."
- 40th Street Black, in Suck
"The great thing is, I just sit around drinking coffee and thinking up
funny crap all day. Unlike you, who march to work in wobbly shoes just
to blow your boss every morning."
- Polly Esther
"What kind of FUCKED UP tour is this?!"
- adapted from The Rock by M. Fuchs and T.
Musser as unofficial slogan for a 3-month assignment in Europe.
"Fuck this planet."
- Val Kilmer, Red Planet
"An argot popular among young ruffians contains forms like
fan-fuckin-tastic, abso-bloody-lutely, Phila-fuckin-delphia, and
Kalama-fuckin-zoo . . . the expletives are placed inside a single word,
always in front of a stressed foot. The rule is followed religiously:
Philadel-fuckin-phia would get you laughed out of the pool hall."
- Steven Pinker, The Language Instintct
"I'm going to try to clean up my apartment at least enough to get it
from looking like a cave where wolves live to maybe, like, a cave where
a caveman lives."
- Cal Lott
"Everybody here is making whoopee
Everybody here got purple hair
Everybody got their Black & Decker
Blood and fetuccine everywhere
Everybody doin' a Zulu war dance
Doin' somethin' with a piece of wood . . ."
- Shriekback
"I feel sorry for people who don't drink, because when they get up in
the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day."
- Frank Sinatra
"We are all God's creatures—that we pray to God for mercy and justice
while we continue to eat the flesh of animals that are slaughtered on
our account is not consistent."
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
"What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral
concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial
purposes we may have."
- Peter Singer, Animal Liberation
"On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with
moderation. No! No! . . . I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will
not excuse—I will not retreate a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD."
- William Lloyd Garrison
"Atlanta is what a quarter of a million Confederate soldiers died to
prevent."
- John Shelton Reed
"There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I
could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me
alive."
- Harriet Tubman
"I received my freedom from Heaven, and with it came the command to
defend my title to it . . . I will not live a slave, and if force is
employed to re-enslave me, I shall make preparations to meet the crisis
as becomes a man."
- J.W. Loguen, escaped slave
"Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be
happy."
- Apollinaire
"The story of a man who was good at only one thing . . . life."
- tagline from Forest Gump
"Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the
days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight
of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God will bring
thee into judgment."
- Ecclesiastes 11:9
"What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how
bad life gets."
"Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a thirteen-year old girl."
- from The Virgin Suicides
"Today you're safe
Tomorrow who knows?
Guarantees are fool's gold
34 turns to 43
See my mistakes
Don't become me"
- Curve, "Storm"
"Because you've got to do something while you're waiting around doing
nothing."
- Joe Laltrello
"He is one who has no use for millions; all he wants is to find an
answer to the problem."
- Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
"The indiscerbible points, the little dimes, where fate takes its
sharpest turns."
- Denis Johnson, The Name of the World
"His eyes had the ebb of his liver in them and he bore the air of a man
who looks right at you and only sees the last of himself."
- Sam Lipsyte, Venus Drive
"Yes, we have lost track of the light, the mornings, the holy innocence
of those who forgive themselves."
- Camus, The Fall
"We're weak and tiny. We're Grenada. There are men parachuting from the
sky. We are waiting for everything to finally stop working—the organs
and systems, one by one, throwing up their hands—The jig is up,
says the endocrine; I did what I could, says the stomach, or
what's left of it; We'll get 'em next time, adds the heart, with
a friendly punch to the shoulder."
- Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius
"Then he would reflect that reality does not tend to coincide with
forecasts about it."
- Jorge Luis Borges, "Ficciones"
"Travel writing is always about a specific moment in time. The writer
imbues that moment with everything that he or she has experienced,
observed, read, lived, bringing all of his or her talent to bear on it.
When focused on that one moment, great travel writing can teach us
something about the world that no other genre can. Perhaps travel
writing's foremost lesson is this: we may never walk this way again, and
even if we do, we will never be the same people as we are right now.
Most important, the world we move through will never be the same place
again."
- Jason Wilson, Best American Travel Writing 2000
"The odyssey began with a British Airways first-class 'sleeper service'
flight from San Francisco to London. At more than $10,500 round trip it
is one of the best reasons I've come across for getting rich . . .
Remember the times when you were a child, a late-night drive home,
dozing in your mama's lap? It's like that, but with free movies and
cognac."
- Douglas Cruickshank, "England's Decadent Delights"
"The French always qualify everything by saying 'perhaps.' This way they
always look like heroes when they actually do something."
- David Lansing, "Confessions of a Cheese Smuggler"
"The Provencal attitude toward time is that there is plenty of it. If by
chance you should run out of it today, more will be available tomorrow.
Or the day after. Or next week."
- Pater Mayle, "The Dangers of Provence"
"Florentines care about the basics, good bread and olive oil, the
closeness of family, the soul's ardor. Even the peasants can recite some
Dante."
- Bill Barich, "Once Upon a Time in Italy"
"There is another world out there. Where they take long lunches and
drink good coffee and wine and stay up too late after dinner."
- Laura Fraser, "Italian Affair"
"I pause before imbibing. Everything about absinth, after all, is
sinister. It proved the undoing of so many artists and writers that the
best book on the subject—Absinth: History in a
Bottle—eventually starts to read like an obituary page . . . The
overall effect is of wearing a pair of ill-fitting goggles in the bottom
of a filthy but surprisingly comfortable aquarium."
- Taras Grescoe, "Absinthe Makes the Heart Grow"
"You can come back from India in tune with the godhead, I suppose, or
you can come back realizing you know nothing about India—or possibly,
anything else. I attained reverse enlightenment. I now don't understand
the entire nature of existence."
- P.J. O'Rourke, "Weird Karma"
"Calcutta's pollution is more visible than it's fashionable for American
pollution to be—smoke and trash instead of microwaves and PCBs. The
food sold on its streets may be unidentifiable, but it's less likely
than New York City hot dogs to contain a cow asshole."
- ibid
"We had all come to the end of the earth to be delighted or revolted—be
anywhere but in the everlasting in-between of daily life."
- Steve Rushin, "Winter Rules"
"Do we travel so that we can arrive where we started and know the place
for the first time—or do we travel so that we can arrive where we
started having earned the right to take T.S. Eliot out of context?"
- Rolf Potts, "Storming The Beach"
"'I might meet a beautiful woman in Limon and decide to spend the rest
of my life there.'
'I did that once.'
'I was joking,' I said.
But Mr. Thornberry was still grimacing. 'It was a disaster in my case.'"
- Paul Theroux, To the Ends of the Earth
"There is something in a man that rebels against too-great constraint
and the rebellion is fitful: Suddenly, one day, the traces are too tight
and every hour of the day is programmed and one is inextricably entwined
in the expectations of others, so you panic, like a trapped animal, and
you extricate yourself, maybe tearing off a limb in the process, for the
simple pleasure of freedom. The freedom to get on any train and see
where it goes. The freedom of silence. The freedom to re-create
yourself."
- Mr. Blue
"Leaving is different from simply going somewhere else."
- Scott Christensen, Enlightenment with a Vengeance
(www.ewav.com)
"And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a
heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive,
undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the
best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end."
- Pico Iyer, "Why We Travel"
"We were fairly sure Zitouni was involved in some way in taking out le
Belge, but he got smoked last Wednesday. Another possible perpetrator
bought it a couple of months ago. All this adds impressively to the
death tally, but it isn't exactly taking the inquiry forward."
- Paris police official, on a rash of gangland
slayings (and all the suspects killing one other)
"American 'unilateralism,' as its critics call it, has not produced
anything like perfect leadership. But there are worse 'isms' than
unilateralism, and three are imperialism, fascism and communism. A
century of American resolve, often in the face of European disdain,
created a continent where not one of these lives as a serious force."
- Michael Kelly, in the Washington Post
"The question is: How much would it cost to contain the global AIDS
epidemic? The short answer is: Well, how much have you got? How much
would it cost to banish ignorance, to deaden lust, to shame rape, to
stop war, to enrich the poor, to empower women, to defend children, to
make decent medical care as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola . . . ?"
- Donald G. McNeil, Jr., in the New York Times
"Human insurrection, in its exalted and tragic forms, is only, and can
only be, a prolonged protest against death, a violent accusation against
the universal death penalty . . . The rebel does not ask for life, but
for reasons for living. He rejects the consequences implied by death. If
nothing lasts, then nothing is justified; everything that dies is
deprived of meaning. To fight against death amounts to claiming that
life has a meaning . . . The rebel obstinately confronts a world
condemned to death and the impenetrable obscurity of the human condition
with his demand for life and absolute clarity. He is seeking, without
knowing it, a moral philosophy or religion."
- Camus, L'homme Revolte
"The only excuse for God is that he does not exist."
- Stendahl
"We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe . . .
our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but it
is a mystery no longer because it is solved."
- Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker
"The emergence in the early twenty-first century of a new form of
intelligence on Earth that can compete with, and ulitimately
significantly exceed, human intelligence will be a development of
greater import than any of the events that have shaped human history.
It will be no less important than the creation of the intelligence that
created it."
- Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines
"'Why, Dan,' ask the people in Artificial Intelligence, 'do you waste
your time conferring with those neuroscientists? They wave their hands
about "information processing" and worry about where it happens,
and which neurotransmitters are involved, and all those boring facts,
but they haven't a clue about the computational requirements of higher
cognitive functions.' 'Why,' ask the neuroscientists, 'do you waste your
time on the fantasies of Artificial intelligence? They just invent
whatever machinery they want, and say unpardonably ignorant things about
the brain.' The cognitive psychologists, meanwhile, are accused of
concocting models with neither biological plausibility nor
proven computational powers; the anthropologists wouldn't know a model
if they saw one, and the philosophers, as we all know, just take in each
other's laundry, warning about confusions they themselves have created,
in an arena bereft of both data and empirically testable theories. With
so many idiots working on the problem, no wonder consciousness is still
a mystery."
- Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
"Consciousness evolved as an adaptionist tool to deal with complex,
rapidly changing circumstances and factors. The need for reconfiguration
arose in what was really a cognitive arms race among humans in their
evolutionary crucible. It has always been the intention of the genes (if
I can say that) that consciousness serve their interests, but
adaptability - the ability to override pre-programmed behaviors became
so valuable in survival that consciousness is now able to override even
the 'prime directive' of reproduction."
- Jeremy F. Kassis
"Evolution is a blind, stupid, algorithmic process. We're driving now (and to the extent that we're not yet driving, we will be), and we have vital, ethical choices to make about how to do things. Forget what the universe did, or wants. The universe created spiders that lay their eggs on moths, who hatch and feed on the living flesh. The universe created cuddly kitties that torture mice for the sheer joy of it before devouring them. Fuck the universe."
"The difference between you, the cow, the fish, the roach, and the
bacteria, is one of complexity and not much more. You're made up of the
same basic amino acids. You're what you are because of the slaughter of
trillions of living things before you in a contest to see which version
happens to be better at reproducing in a particular environment. We are
all a test to see if we will work well and if we don't we're tossed
aside like piles of worthless chemicals we are. The only difference
humans have is that they know this and it sucks."
- Scott Christensen
"Dude, this is pretty fucked up right here."
- Stan, "The Spirit of Christmas"
"Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with
talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence
and determination alone are omnipotent."
- Calvin Coolidge
"If you survive the mountains, you survive the Tour, and if you survive
the Tour you are a Giant of the Road."
- Tim Moore, French Revolutions, Cycling the Tour de
France
"If we cannot find our account in one world, we shall in another. It is
a great pleasure to see and do new things."
- Voltaire
"I trust that the wounds will heal, the scars will vanish, that the
sorry and ridiculous spectacle of man's disagreements and clashes will
disappear . . . and that, in the end, something so magnificent will
take place that it will satisfy every human heart, allay all
indignation, pay for all human crimes, for all the blood shed by men,
and enable everyone not only to forgive everything but also to justify
everything that has happened to men."
- Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov
"Let's roll."
- Todd Beamer, Flight 932001.12.01