Geoffrey's List of Interesting Quotes

• ``The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.'' -- Gilbert K. Chesterton

• ``School's goal is to prepare them to be anything they want. But the process is so dullifying and kids haven't explored the possibilities of what they could be that many set their sites as low as possible. They go to college to get a job to buy stuff.'' -- Joyce Fetteroll

• ``War is terrorism with a bigger budget'' -- sign at the SF peace rally, 1/18/2003

• ``Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.'' -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

• ``I will always remember the day Rene Decartes died. We had just finished a wonderful meal and were sitting around plotting our next move over coffee. The waitress came up and asked, `More Coffee?' Decartes replied, `I think not.' And just disappeared right before my eyes.''

• ``I invented <Ctrl><Alt><Delete>, but Bill Gates made it famous.'' -- David Bradley, member of the original IBM PC design team

• ``The Exchange Server has been down all week, but at least it's stable.''

• ``I'm not trying to give users what they want, I'm trying to give them freedom, which they can then accept or reject. If people don't want freedom, they may be out of luck with me, but I won't allow them to define for me what is right, what is worth spending my life for.'' -- Richard Stallman

• ``... Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.''

• ``An unforseen issue has arisen with your computer. Don't worry your silly little head about what has gone wrong; here's a pretty animation of a paperclip to look at instead.'' -- Windows2007 error message

• ``Signals don't kill programs. Programs kill programs.''

• ``Everything that I've learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles:
  Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, he can make it work.
  Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't.
  PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't.''
  -- Philip Greenspun

• ``It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's,
  not its, if you mean it
  is. If you don't, it's its. Then too,
  it's hers. It isn't her's. It
  isn't our's either. It's ours, and
  likewise yours and theirs.''
  -- Oxford University Press, Edpress News

• ``When the passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, tootle him with vigour'' -- On the driver instructions in a Japanese rental car.

• ``Microsoft - Is it going to work today?''

• ``We don't KNOW that smoking is making these people sick ... it could be air pollution ...'' -- Head of the R.J.Reynolds Health Department

• Smoking areas in restaurants are like peeing areas in swimming pools.

• ``Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.'' -- Dennis Ritchie, Unix co-creator

• ``I entered the office and tossed my hat at the coat rack. It missed, hit the heater, and instantly burst into flames. That reminded me: I had some work to do in Windows.'' -- Lincoln Spector "The Maltese Penguin"

• ``I hated the operating system; it was a complete and utter kludge, and the whole bloody design was just a mess. I wouldn't go anywhere near it.'' -- Sir Clive Sinclair on the IBM PC, ``Wired''

• Science is the game we play with God to find out what His rules are.

• Re. graphics: A picture is worth 10K words -- but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

• ``The Internet, of course, is more than just a place to find pictures of people having sex with dogs.'' -- Time Magazine, 3 July 1995

• ``It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.'' -- Hume

• ``Applying computer technology to a problem is simply a matter of finding the right wrench to pound in the correct screw.''

• ``If you get bitten by a bug, tough luck...the one thing I won't do is feel sorry for you. In fact, I might ask you to do it all over again, just to get more information. I'm a heartless bastard.'' -- Linus Torvalds (on development kernels)

• ``Windows 95: from the guys who brought you EDLIN''

• The Lesser-Known Programming Languages #12: LITHP
  This otherwise unremarkable language is distinguished by the absence of an "S" in its character set; users must substitute "TH". LITHP is said to be useful in protheththing lithtth.

• ``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

• ``Oooh, YAH! I'm so good I constantly amaze myself. And modest, too.'' -- Linus Torvalds

• ``Have you considered a life? I hear they're quite affordable these days.'' -- shields@tembel.org

• ``And then I realized that it never should have worked in the first place. Thus, it would not work again until rewritten.'' -- Anon.

• 43rd Law of Computing:
  Anything that can go wr
  Segmentation violation -- Core dumped

• ``You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.'' -- Dean Martin

• ``Time is just one damn thing after another'' -- PBS/Nova

• ``Never put off until tomorrow that which can be done the day after tomorrow'' -- Mark Twain

• ``Prizes are for children.'' -- Charles Ives, upon being given, but refusing, the Pulitzer prize

• Dyslexics of the world, UNTIE!

• ``The other day I put instant coffee in my microwave oven ... I almost went back in time.'' -- Steven Wright

• ``We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans ...'' -- Bill Clinton (USA TODAY, 11 March 1993, page 2A)

• No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

• ``Anatomy (n): something everyone has, but which looks better on a girl.'' -- Bruce Raeburn.

• ``Cleavage (n): something you can approve of and look down on at the same time.'' -- W. Garnett.

• Erotic (adj): using a feather as a sex aid.
  Kinky (adj): using the whole duck.

• ``Bill Gates, brilliant? Really? Uh-huh [Ellison laughs for several seconds].'' -- Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, interviewed in Forbes ASAP

• Bagpipes (n): an octopus wearing a kilt.

• Smile, it makes people wonder what you are thinking...

• Indecision is the key to flexibility.

• ``We have analysed over two million images downloaded from eBay but have not been able to find a single hidden message'' -- Niels Provos and Peter Honeyman, authors of ``Detecting Steganographic Content on the Internet''

Last Change: Saturday, 23-Dec-2006 17:41:55 CST