After Donald Trump's stretch limousine was stolen and found undamaged a few blocks away; he said, "Nothing was stolen. I had an honest thief."-International Herald Tribune, page 3, March 2, 1992

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. ~ Plato

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work. -- Simone Weil

What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care. ~ William Blake

As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?

There are 3 types of guys -- the ones who hate nerds (all nerds, that is; girls aren't let off the hook); the ones who are scared off by girls who are slightly more intelligent than average; and the guys who are also somewhat more intelligent than average, but are so shy that they can't put 2 words together when they're within 20 feet of a girl. -- Vikki Roemer on debian-curiosa

Chuck Norris neither melts in your mouth nor in your hand. He shreds your trachea before ravaging your soul with a combination of chocolate, whickey, roundhouse kicks and death. Oh, and pain. Lots of pain.

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him. -- Simone Weil

This is Unix we're talking about, remember. It's not supposed to be nice for the applications programmer. -- Matthew Danish on debian-devel

Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed. -- Emma Goldman

Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth.

At first I thought, if I were Superman, a perfect secret identity would be "Clark Kent, Dentist," because you could save money on tooth X-rays. But then I thought, if a patient said, "How's my back tooth?" and you just looked at it with your X-ray vision and said, "Oh it's okay," then the patient would probably say, "Aren't you going to take an X-ray, stupid?" and you'd say, "Aw fuck you, get outta here," and then he probably wouldn't even pay his bill. -- Jack Handey

... This striving for excellence extends into people's personal lives as well. When '80s people buy something, they buy the best one, as determined by (1) price and (2) lack of availability. Eighties people buy imported dental floss. They buy gourmet baking soda. If an '80s couple goes to a restaurant where they have made a reservation three weeks in advance, and they are informed that their table is available, they stalk out immediately, because they know it is not an excellent restaurant. If it were, it would have an enormous crowd of excellence-oriented people like themselves waiting, their beepers going off like crickets in the night. An excellent restaurant wouldn't have a table ready immediately for anybody below the rank of Liza Minnelli. -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"

It occurred to me lately that nothing has occurred to me lately.

What no spouse of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.

A man is locked in a room with only a piano. How does he escape? The man uses a piano “key” to escape. Then he uses religion to escape, then drugs, then a relationship that clearly won’t work out in the long term, then unhealthy food, then rage, then the “key” again, because it’s a cycle, it’s an endless cycle, and he can never truly escape until he accepts that she’s really gone. .. ~ Ethan Kuperberg

degrass adj. Entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the universe, experienced in a jolt of recognition that the night sky is not just a wallpaper but a deeply foreign ocean whose currents are steadily carrying off all other castaways, who share our predicament but are already well out of earshot - worlds and stars who would've been lost entirely except for the scrap of light they were able to fling out into the dark, a message in a bottle that's only just now washing up in the Earths atmosphere, an invitation to a party that already ended a million years ago. ~ Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The startling truth finally became apparent, and it was this: Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single statement took the scientific world by storm. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure, and the science of mathematics was put back by years. -- Douglas Adams

I am in you and you in me, mutual in divine love. ~ William Blake

After the game the king and the pawn go in the same box. -- Italian proverb