There is hardly a thing in the world that some man can not make a little worse and sell a little cheaper

Just some random quotes I found on the Internet and thought worth keeping. I've tried to attribute them to source wherever possible, but some I just don't know about. If you know, drop me a line.

Some of them are in German, you'll just have to bear it or get yourself a english-german dictionary. Not all of them reflect my Views, after all, this file is supposed to be interesting, not a manifesto.

Cute quotes

There is hardly a thing in the world that some man can not make a little worse and sell a little cheaper.

Success is relative: It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things. -- T.S. Eliot, "The Family Reunion"

Microsoft Windows: Proof that P.T. Barnum was correct.

-- from Denny Miller's .sig

 

-rw-rw-rw- : the file permission of the beast

 

In the beginning, God created the Baptists. And the Baptists looked at their ownselves and said, "We good." And God saw it was too late.

-- Joe Bob Briggs

 

 

A man who was handsome, intelligent, and elegant, was asked who he was. "I am the Devil", he replied. "But that cannot be," said the questioner, "for the Devil is evil and ugly!" "My friend," was the reply, "you have been listening to my detractors." -- Idries Shah

 

An open mind has but one disadvantage:
it collects dirt.

--anonymous

 

It's not the Information Superhighway, but the Information Sewer Sytem:
Every nitwit with a toilet flushing the most unimaginable garbage upon us.

 

"Listen! a banshee's moan!"
"Oh, grow up! Banshees are mythical characters! they don't exist....
Besides that was the mating call of a unicorn"

-- Hagar the Horrible

 

Weiler's Law:

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.

 

 

Apollo, the God of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number -- Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar and have a beer with Dionysos, every now and then. -- U.K. LeGuin

 

"He wanted to do kinky sex, y'know, like that oral stuff with the LIGHTS on and me on top even"

--anon.

"We aren't perverts! Well yeah, we tie each other up and play with icecubes from time to time, but we _never_ do anything in the _least_ bit kinky!"

--anon.

 

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

-- Knuth

 

"But what would a cat do with pajamas?"
"Shred them usually."

 

Cats make terrible footballs, but great ranged weapons...

 

 

There are many intelligent species in the Universe.
They are all owned by cats.

 

Suppose there were no hypothetical questions?

 

"If men and women gave birth alternately, there would never be more than three children in any family."

--Vicki Robinson

 

There is one terrifying word in the world of nuclear physics.....Oops.

 

Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great and mystical powers.
We know this because they are capable of being both invisible and pink at the same time...
The religion of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based on both faith and logic.
Faith tells us that they are pink; through logic, we know that they are invisible....

--Steve Eley

 

Program (Pro'-gram) n. A magic spell cast over a computer, causing it to turn one's input into error messages.

 

Masochists are people who have pain confused with pleasure. In a society which has television confused with entertainment, Doritos confused with food, and Dan Quayle confused with a national political leader, masochists are clearly less mixed up than the rest of us."

-- P.J. O'Rourke

 

... "Bones! It's Ensign Fellatio!" "She's head, Jim."

 

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject

-- Winston Churchill

 

X-rated movies are all alike ... the only thing they leave to the imagination is the plot.

-- Brad Littlejohn

 

Conversation, n.:

A vocal competition in which the one who is catching his breath is called the listener. -- Brad Littlejohn

 

Viele wollen zunaechst die Freiheit, sich trauen zu duerfen, um spaeter anderen verbieten zu wollen, was sie sich doch nicht getraut haben ;-)

-- Sven Dirks

 

Most of the people I know are more critical of their own faults. Especially when they find them in other people.

-- Seth

 

If you feed a dog, they will look at you and think, "YOU are MY God!"
If you feed a cat, they will look at you and think, "I am a GOD."
 

--Devi the little grumpy cat lover

 

A cat KNOWS what you want.
It doesn't CARE, but it KNOWS.

 

Hier laeuft EHNIX und ist ZUNIX kompatibel

-- Tobias Schorr

 

 

The Wise Cat is patient. He lives for himself, not for the things
that come to him. Therefore, he has all things.
"The Tao of Meow"
--Diane Janssen

 

If two men agree on everything, you can be sure one of them is doing the thinking.

-- Lyndon Baines Johnson

 

Yeah, but you're taking the universe out of context.

-- Unknown

 

 

One day it was announced by master Joshu that the young monk Kyogen had reached an enlightened state. Much impressed by this news, several of his peers went to speak with him.
"We have heard that you are enlightened. Is this true?"
"It is," Kyogen answered.
"Tell us," said a friend, "how do you feel?"
"As miserable as ever," replied the enlightened Kyogen.

 

de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.

Three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner -- Bill Gunshannon, [email protected]

 

 

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's a whole bunch of conformists who have just decided that the nonconformist's behavior, apparel, or decoration are worthy of imitation. (apologies to Bill Vaughan)

 

The longer a man is wrong, the surer he is that he's right.

 

The best way to get information on Usenet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong information.

-- [email protected] (Aahz)

 

The government which fears arms in the hands of its people...should.

 

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

--e. e. cummings

 

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

-- G. B. Shaw

 

Pascal, n.:

A programming language named after a man who would turn over in his grave if he knew about it.

 

Women are like programs, smart men keep a backup.

-- Dave Hutchison

 

Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons for it afterwards.

-- Soren F. Petersen

 

The Bible is a translation of a translation of a translation. I don't trust any word in there to be precise.

-- Stef Jones ([email protected])

 

Users, like hard disks, fall into two categories: those that have massively screwed up, and those that will.

--Ben Yalow

 

You know how dumb the average person is? Well, by definition half of 'em are dumber than THAT.

-- J.R. "Bob" Dobbs

 

Code fast, crash young, and leave a pretty core

-- Robert Cohen

 

A society without religion is like a crazed psychopath without a loaded .45

-- Mike Beebe

 

I'd like to buy him for what I think he is worth, and sell him for what he thinks he is worth.

-- [email protected]

 

LOVE (short definition):

"Here's my heart, here's a sledgehammer ... go for it."

-- Michael Kellen

 

A pessimist is someone who has had to listen to too many Optimists.

-- Unknown

 

Under capitalism, man exploits man.
Under socialism, it's just the opposite.

--John Kenneth Galbraith

 

Ah, but they're cute small furry instruments of the devil.

--Piglet

 

A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.

--Unknown

 

 

How many code must a man type in
Before you can call him a man?
How many C must a compiler process
Before it can sleep in the RAM?
How many times must MS-DOS crash
Before it is forever banned?
 

-- Joerg Anslik

 

Humans...God's attempt to pass the Turing test.

-- Maya

 

Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

--Mark Twain

 

Diplomacy: The art of saying "Nice Doggy" while searching for a rock

-- Paul Austin

 

Automation ist der Versuch des Mannes, die Arbeit so zu gestalten, dass die Frau sie tun kann.

--(Sponti-Sprueche)

 

Windows isn't crippleware: it's "Functionally Challenged"

-- Alexander Aulbach

 

 

         {~, ,~} 
          ( ^ )  
         ()~*~()
         (_)-(_)

-- Laura Beth Chamberlain ([email protected])

 

"If you make a fool of yourself in front of a cat, he will sneer at you, if you are sober; he will leave the room if you are drunk.
If you make a fool of yourself in front of a dog, he will make a fool of himself, too."

-- Chuck Jones, Chuck Amuck:The Life And Times Of An Animated Cartoonist

 

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

-- Albert Einstein

 

Anything not nailed down is a cat toy, anything the cat can pry up with a crow bar is not nailed down, anything that IS nailed down is a scratching post. And anything edible is food.

-- Revar

 

But when you borrow from everybody, it's "research".

--Charlie Luce (paraphrasing R. A. Heinlein)

 

People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.

-- Vice President Dan Quayle

 

"(F)rames can add something to a page, primarily annoyance..."

-- Were-Mutt

 

Computers are like airconditioned rooms, so do not open WINDOWS !

-- Stephen Simmat

 

Hiroshima '45 ... Tschernobyl '86 ... Windows '95 ...

-- Tiggy Tigress

 

Make more of the stuff you like happen.
-- Dr. Cat

 

Make no laws whatever concerning speech and, speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license;" and they will define and define freedom out of existence.

-- Voltarine de Cleyre (1866-1912)

 

If this goes on, soon Political Correctness will kill good sexist humor!

-- Eric Schwartz (A walk in the Park)

 

If you're happy and you know it, clank your chains!

 

Snuggling is sex for the soul.

-- Kim Christensen ([email protected])

 

Context is everything. Breast-feeding is beneficial for nearly all infants ---
but for an elderly cardiac patient, it can be fatal...

-- Samuel Webster, M.D

 

 

God gave women buttocks because sooner or later they have to walk away from us, and at least this way there's some consolation.
-- Joe Quigley

 

The human race has few (if any) problems that couldn't be solved by massive wealth. And we're litterally surrounded by it, like a fly in amber. Now if we only had brains...

-- Ben Bova

 

Politically correct euphemisms are for the diffrently-brained.

-- Tanya Latimer

 

Buy a PentiumPro 200 so you can reboot faster.

 

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.

-- Mitch Ratcliffe

 

Actually, you don't need to warn someone before tit-bashing them, but you should know before-hand if they can _handle_ being tit-bashed. It's pointless to suffocate someone who can't or won't appreciate it. No matter _what_ Jim Groat says about the health benefits. :3

--ermine (aka Micole The Ermine, Lisa Jennings, Omaha the Cat, the original titbasher,etc.) home email: <[email protected]>

 

Real Life? What's that? Oh yeah, the annoying time between computer crashes.

-- Steven Stephens

 

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.

-- Rich Kulawiec

 

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

-- Donald Knuth

 

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

 

Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow.

-- Bill Gates

 

Every group has a couple of experts. And every group has at least one idiot. Thus are balance and harmony (and discord) maintained. It's sometimes hard to remember this in the bulk of the flamewars that all of the hassle and pain is generally caused by one or two highly-motivated, caustic twits.

-- Chuq Von Rospach, about Usenet

That's not just one or two, that's scores of them, and they're breeding.

-- Miavir (reading a.f.furry)

 

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 percent of them are wrong.

--H.L. Mencken

 

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
--H.L. Mencken

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.
--Oscar Wilde

 

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

--H.G. Wells

 

The weak conform, the strong survive

Some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, and some people wonder, 'What happened?'

 

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. :-)

--Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Kitman's Law:

Pure drivel tends to drive ordinary drivel off the TV screen.

 

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

 

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

--Buddha

 

Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.

--Voltaire

 

In young scientific fields, if you say all the accepted positions are wrong, you'll seldom be wrong.

--J. Ostriker

 

When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to reform.

--Mark Twain

I'm going to live forever, or die trying.

 

Most of life's problems can be solved by curling up and sleeping in a sunbeam.

 

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap!

--Cynthia Heimel

 

Engineers think that equations approximate the real world.
Scientists think that the real world approximates equations.
Mathematicians are unable to make the connection.

It is not a sign of weakness to ask for guidance; nor is it a crime to be uninformed, but to choose the path of ignorance is unforgivable.

 

The cat could very well be man's best friend, but would never stoop to admitting it.

--Doug Larson

To an optimist, it's half full.
To a pessimist, it's half empty.
To an engineer, it's twice as big as necessary...

 

If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable.

--John F. Kennedy

 

Our earth is degenerate these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common.

--Inscription, 4800 year-old tablet (quoted in Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts)

 

We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self control.

--Inscription, 6000 year-old Egyptian tomb (quoted in R.Buckminster Fuller's I Seem to be a Verb)

 

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

--Ghandi

 

The point to remember is that what the government gives, it must first take away.

--John S. Coleman

 

When I get a little money, I buy books; and, if any is left, I buy food and clothes.

--Erasmus

 

A man is as old as the woman he feels.

--Groucho Marx

 

The Sweetest distance between Two Points... is a Curvy Line!

--Mae West

 

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

--Voltaire

 

The sun, the moon, and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of human hands.

--Havelock Ellis

 

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

--George Eliot

 

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.

--Ken Olson, President of DEC, World Future Society Convention, 1977

 

Never just complain. Exchange, listen, inform, work toward solutions. Choose your battles carefully and realistically and take action.

--Grey Watson

 

This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!

--Adolph Hitler, April 15, 1935

 

Miavir: And we still have 'full' gun registration,... and any crook that really wants a gun can get one.<sigh>

 

Outlawing cryptography is like outlawing pencils because bookies use them to record bets.

--John Perry Barlow, EFF-Austin Cryptography Conference (October 1993)

 

Microsoft - We put the "backwards" into backwards compatibility.

-- Anonymous sig

 

The problem with the global village is all the global village idiots

--P. Ginsparg

 

.. the Twentieth Century, the innovative century that brought you WW I, WW II, and WWW.

--Bill Higgins .sig

 

Stop tolerating in your leaders what you would not tolerate in your friends.

--Michael Ventura

 

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

--Howard Aiken

 

 

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

-- George Bernard Shaw

 

And *especially* the lazy unreasonable man.

-- Miavir

 

Windows95: <win-doz-nin-te-fiv> n.:

32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company, that can't stand 1 bit of competition.

-- from Holger Lamm's .sig

 

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

 

Originality is the art of concealing your source.

 

Traditional human government consists of thieves and murderers. By adopting the electoral process, we have weeded out the murderers. This is actually about as good as it gets.

 

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.

-- Nikita Khrushchev

 

H. L. Mencken's Law:

Those who can -- do.
Those who can't -- teach.

 

Martin's Extension:

Those who cannot teach -- administrate.

 

Miavir's Extension:

Those who cannot administrate -- criticize.

 

Kai's Addendum:

Those who cannot do anything -- become politicians.

 

-- From Tony Gale <[email protected]> 's .signature:

The Arkansas legislature passed a law that states that the Arkansas River can rise no higher than to the Main Street bridge in Little Rock.

 

I'm sorry. This thread is reserved for pointless semantic arguments. Please take your genuine concerns elsewhere. Thank you.

--seen on usenet

 

 

Voodoo Programming:	Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything.

-- Karl Lehenbauer

 

On the eighth day God created cats and was promptly ignored.

--From [email protected] 's .signature.

 

Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

-- Henry Spencer, University of Toronto Unix hack

Nine megs for the secretaries fair,
Seven megs for the hackers scarce,
Five megs for the grads in smoky lairs,
Three megs for system source;

 

One disk to rule them all,
One disk to bind them,
One disk to hold the files
And in the darkness grind 'em.

Rule 46, Oxford Union Society, London:

Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to a fine of one pound. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat.

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author (or referenced source) and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the Softpanorama society. We do not warrant the correctness of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose. The site uses AdSense so you need to be aware of Google privacy policy. You you do not want to be tracked by Google please disable Javascript for this site. This site is perfectly usable without Javascript.

Last modified: July, 07, 2013