Although I've been an Internet email user from before there was an Internet - since I first laid hands on an Alto connected to the ARPAnet in mid-1983 - it was nearly a decade before I picked up the habit of attaching a quotation as a signature. After a few months of using these casually I decided to systematize things: keep a file of potential quotations as I came across them in my reading, and change the actual signature once a month. Here's the collection so far.
ca. 02/1991:
This U.S. stamp, along with 25 [cents] of additional U.S. postage,
is equivalent to the 'F' stamp rate
- Official Algorithm of the US Postal Service
02/1992 - 03/1992; 01/1994:
Is it possible to see this simple business as obscure and mysterious?
We must try.
- J. S. Bell
04/1992:
Intelligence is nothing without delight
- Paul Claudel
05/1992:
To be prepared against surprise is to be trained.
To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.
- James Carse
06/1992:
Careful! We don't want to learn anything from this.
- Calvin (Bill Watterson)
07/1992:
Give me a burrito. . .resistance is futile!
- Steve Roberts, of Winnebiko and BEHEMOTH fame,
to a terrified clerk at a Taco Bell drive-through
08/1992:
TV dinner by the pool; I'm so glad I finished school!
- Frank Zappa
09/1992:
Between 20 and 30 percent of the gross national product of the
United States comes from high energy physics.
- Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX)
10/1992:
Sloppy thinking gets worse over time
- Jenny Holzer
11/1992:
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
- Lord Acton, who is almost always misquoted
12/1992:
[X and Y] point out that their device is hardly state of the art.
It was, after all, built out of off-the-shelf parts by theorists.
- world-class understatement from the November /Physics Today/
01/1993:
Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living
that wears you out.
- Chekhov
02/1993:
Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth
century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice.
- Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual
03/1993:
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
- Richard Feynman
04/1993:
[It's] like saying Michelangelo *helped* paint the Sistine chapel
just because some Pope owned the ceiling.
- Art Spiegelman
05/1993:
These holdings enrich the literature of sophistry.
- I. F. Stone,
on a couple of Supreme Court opinions he didn't care for
06/1993:
Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of UNIX, although they should
have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement.
- MIT AI Lab job ad in the /Boston Globe/
07/1993:
Contention is better than loneliness.
- old Irish proverb; proposed netnews motto (RFC1609)
08/1993:
Usually, if you're calling any shots at all, you're not eating worms.
- Derkins' Canonical Test of Empowerment
(Bill Watterson)
09/1993:
A dozen press agents working overtime can do terrible things
to the human spirit.
- Cecil B. De Mille
10/1993:
I don't think my name will mean much to the bear business,
but you're welcome to use it.
- Theodore Roosevelt
11/1993:
The status quo is the only solution that cannot be vetoed.
- Clark Kerr
12/1993:
In this world, there is one terrible thing,
and that is that everyone has his reasons.
- Jean Renoir
02/1994:
Data without generalization is just gossip.
- Robert Pirsig
03/1994:
The point of philosophy is to start with something so
simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with
something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
- Bertrand Russell
04/1994:
Bachelors and Masters of Arts who do not follow Aristotle's
philosophy are subject to a fine of 5 shillings for each
point of divergence.
- 14th century statute of Oxford University
05/1994:
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
- Oscar Wilde
06/1994:
Bad policies, stupid policies, gutless policies have real consequences.
- Molly Ivins
07/1994:
I can speak to almost anything with a lot of authority.
- Fred Barnes
08/1994:
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, who obviously never read netnews
09/1994:
There's always an easy solution to every human problem -
neat, plausible, and wrong.
- H. L. Mencken
10/1994:
It is not necessary to understand things
in order to argue about them.
- Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
11/1994:
Because if they didn't vote for a lizard the wrong lizard
might get in. Got any gin?
- Ford Prefect (Douglas Adams)
12/1994:
We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.
- Walt Kelly
01/1995:
Most of the folks I talk to in the television industry think
that interactive television consists of putting a 'Buy'
button on your channel clicker.
- John Perry Barlow
02/1995:
There's a fine line between participation and mockery.
- Wally (Scott Adams)
03/1995:
Stop thinking about it as the information highway and start thinking
about it as the marketing superhighway. Doesn't it sound better already?
- Don Logan, President & CEO of Time, Inc
to the Association of National Advertisers
04/1995:
You know how every morning I make it a point to think about
doing twenty minutes of vigorous exercise? Well I think
it's doing me a lot more good than it actually is.
- Willy (Joe Martin)
05/1995:
Percentage of Americans who believe that every holder of
a PhD has attended medical school: 41
- /Harper's/ Index
06/1995:
I'm tempted to say that this argument is disingenuous,
but I have a sneaking suspicion that it may merely be ingenuous.
- Dani Zweig
07/1995:
It is not unfair to say that obscurities in the presentation
do not seem to arise wholly from the inherent complexities
of the problem.
- Edmund Stoner
08/1995:
Demagogue: One who preaches doctrine he knows to be untrue
to men he knows to be idiots.
- H. L. Mencken
09/1995:
Anybody who's not bothered by Bell's theorem
has to have rocks in his head.
- unnamed Princeton physicist, quoted by David Mermin
10/1995:
If the average kid has witnessed 100,000 acts of violence by
the age of 12, how many examples of glib hypocrisy and
self-serving deceit do you suppose they've seen? Enough to
get 'Larry King Live' banned for all eternity is my guess.
- Will Durst
11/1995:
There's a detailed explanation at the bottom of the hole.
- Catbert (Scott Adams)
12/1995:
. . .when you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains,
however improbable, had better work or we're all in big trouble.
- [apologies to] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
01/1996:
*All* lies are told with a straight face. It's truth that's said
with a dismissive giggle.
- P. J. O'Rourke
02/1996:
Editor's Note: A mistake made by a transcription service mangled a
quotation from William Bennett in Michael Kelley's July 17th Letter from
Washington. In criticizing the political views of Patrick Buchanan, Mr.
Bennett said 'it's a real us-and-them kind of thing,' not, as we reported,
'it's a real S & M kind of thing.'
- correction in the August 14, 1995, issue of /The New Yorker/
03/1996:
I just want people to know that I actually admire everyone I
make fun of in my book [/Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, and
Other Observations/]. Except Pat Robertson. He's a lunatic.
And I really don't like Limbaugh. And Pat Buchanan, let's face
it, is a bigot. Dick Armey I have no use for. And Gingrich
just plain scares me.
- Al Franken
04/1996:
A thousand stories which the ignorant tell, and believe,
die away at once when the computist takes them in his gripe.
- Samuel Johnson, who obviously never read netnews
05/1996:
This web project is the most self-indulgent, egotistical thing
I have ever done in my life. But the day is young. I can top it.
- Scott Adams
06/1996:
One horselaugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.
- H. L. Mencken
07/1996:
It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem.
But I would like to understand it too.
- Eugene Wigner
08/1996:
Number of hand-woven napkins bearing Alfred Nobel's portrait
that were stolen from the 1995 Nobel Prize banquet: 88
- /Harper's/ Index
09/1996:
You can fool all the people all the time
if the advertising budget is big enough.
- Ed Rollins
10/1996:
Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea
that life is serious.
- Brendan Gill
11/1996:
Every government is run by liars and nothing they say
should be believed.
- I. F. Stone
12/1996:
The best performance improvement is the transition
from the nonworking state to the working state.
- John Ousterhout
01/1997:
Truth comes out of error more easily than out of confusion.
- Francis Bacon
02/1997:
If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.
- Don Knuth
03/1997:
What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is
the matter with the rich is uselessness.
- George Bernard Shaw
04/1997:
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance
when the need for illusion is deep.
- Saul Bellow
05/1997:
We should take care not to make the intellect our god;
it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
- Albert Einstein
06/1997:
I have always consistently opposed high-tension and alternating
systems of electric lighting, not only on account of danger,
but because of their general unreliability and unsuitability
for any general system of distribution.
- Thomas Edison
07/1997:
Humans are hampered because such things as logic
can control the libido.
- Pat Craig (Knight-Ridder News Service)
08/1997:
Reality is a useful brake on megalomania.
- Clive James
09/1997:
It is also a good rule not to put too much confidence in
experimental results until they have been confirmed by theory.
- Sir Arthur Eddington
10/1997:
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk.
That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
- Ernest Hemingway
11/1997:
Marketing folks would rather hang themselves than learn
the arguments to the grep command.
- Alex Simeonides
12/1997:
The best way to sound like you know what you're talking about
is to know what you're talking about.
- Scott Simon
01/1998:
"Absolute truth? What's that?"
"It's a five-to-four decision of the Supreme Court."
- Dan O'Neill
02/1998:
Business is more than making money; losing less money is
sometimes important too.
- Kim Woo-Choong
03/1998:
The sudden spike in Bill Clinton's popularity is baffling
only to those who still think of politics as an autonomous
realm, existing apart from entertainment.
- Kurt Andersen
04/1998:
Nature follows quantum mechanical predictions
even when these predictions seem to be crazy.
- Alain Aspect
05/1998:
There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words
a wonderful obstruction to the mind.
- Francis Bacon
06/1998:
But that's the beauty of the game. At this very moment, your
absurd vicarious defeat is being perfectly counterbalanced by
some opposing fan's absurd vicarious triumph.
- Robert Mankoff
07/1998:
Advertisers know that no matter how excellent an automobile may be,
it will not sell if it is called a "Lumbering Elephant."
- Neil Postman
08/1998:
Where understanding fails, a word will come to take its place.
- Goethe
09/1998:
The key to productivity is to rotate your avoidance techniques.
- Too Much Coffee Man (Shannon Wheeler)
10/1998:
Rank of 'listening to other students' among the classroom
activities that schoolchildren find most boring: 1
- /Harper's/ Index
11/1998:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something
when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
- Upton Sinclair
12/1998:
If you ask me, most sports would benefit
from an infusion of rocketry.
- Jason Fox (Bill Amend)
01/1999:
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown
is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
- Bertrand Russell
02/1999:
I'm all in favor of the democratic principle that one idiot is as
good as one genius, but I draw the line when someone takes the next
step and concludes that two idiots are better than one genius.
- Leo Szilard
03/1999:
Find computer scientists you respect and listen to their
recommendations. When they are still making the same
recommendations a year later, look into it.
- Paul Dubois
04/1999:
In our time, political speech and writing are
largely the defense of the indefensible.
- George Orwell, writing in 1946
05/1999:
The data structures of the code require some degree
higher than a PhD to understand, since we've got PhDs
and we can't figure them out. - J. A. Templon
06/1999:
Avoid studies of which the result dies with the worker.
- Leonardo da Vinci
07/1999:
It's a great failing of televangelism that the
Pentecostal wind blows so rarely on home repair problems.
- Colin McEnroe
08/1999:
The entrepreneurial spirit is not rare in humankind. The problem
is most people who have it, apply it to lunatic enterprises.
- Mike O'Brien
09/1999:
Spend the optimal amount of time on each decision
and pretty soon you run out of life.
- Steven Waldman
10/1999:
Kids, thinking about theories is no way to get an education!
- God-Man (Ruben Bolling)
11/1999:
If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.
- Edward Hopper
12/1999:
It doesn't matter that I'm a crab! I'm an Internet visionary!
- Hawthorne (Jim Toomey)
01/2000:
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving
there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.
- John Kenneth Galbraith
02/2000:
Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that
I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful
nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them.
- René Descartes
03/2000:
With software, unusual conditions come up all the time;
seemingly impossible conditions take a little longer.
- Watts Humphrey
04/2000:
An advertiser will happily make you feel bad about
yourself if that will make you buy, say, a Bic pen.
- George Meyer
05/2000:
In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.
- Charles Carruthers
06/2000:
You can never solve all difficulties at once.
- Paul Dirac
07/2000:
A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only
advise his client to plant vines.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
08/2000:
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save)
the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes
it hard to plan the day.
- E. B. White
09/2000:
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong,
as when you find a trout in the milk.
- Henry David Thoreau
10/2000:
I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
- Wilson Mizner
11/2000:
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will
to find out, which is the exact opposite.
- Bertrand Russell
12/2000:
I know nothing about this subject but I do have
prejudices, which I am more than happy to share with you.
- Leon Botstein
01/2001:
The power of accurate observation is frequently called
cynicism by those who don't have it.
- George Bernard Shaw
02/2001:
Having your book made into a movie is like having
your ox made into a bouillon cube.
- Bill Neely
03/2001:
They are the sort of people who think that no observation is
so intuitive that it can't be improved by regression analysis.
- Louis Menand
04/2001:
Popular memory may be short, but it is nothing
compared with the amnesia of experts.
- Adam Gopnik
05/2001:
In any business model you need someone to sue.
That's the American way.
- Bill Weinberg
06/2001:
As a rule, I tend to avoid activities
that require snakeproof boots.
- Jonathan Rosen
07/2001:
The chief executives of large American corporations are,
as a class, the most overpaid people on the planet.
- James Surowiecki
08/2001:
Don't talk to the crazy people on the street, even though
they may seem fun to be with.
- /CityPack, New York/ Chinese language edition (1996)
09/2001:
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results,
but that's not why we do it. - Richard Feynman
10/2001:
Meeting the author, I think, is one of life's most reliably
disappointing experiences. - Billy Collins
11/2001:
After a recent trip to New York one French journalist remarked that
leafing through a copy of /Forbes/ or /Fortune/ is like reading the
operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship.
- Adam Gopnik
12/2001:
This is a clear abuse of the God-given gifts
of repression and denial.
- The Reverend Theo Fobius (Howard Tayler)
01/2002:
Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
- Henry David Thoreau
02/2002:
Back in the Sixties we didn't have video games and the
Internet. All we had was drugs and naked people.
- Scott Bateman
03/2002:
What about my right to live on a street with a name
of my choosing? Huh?
- Riley "Escobar" Freeman (Aaron McGruder)
04/2002:
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary
out of order. - Jean Cocteau
05/2002:
The Enron scandal calls into question the integrity of the
entire capitalist system, which previously we assumed was based
on honest, straightforward greed. - Joel Achenbach
06/2002:
Until we test our beliefs, we can't say for sure if we have
leeches or we have aspirin. - David Faigman
07/2002:
What is this endless series of meaningless experiences
trying to teach me? - Bruce Eric Kaplan
08/2002:
Nothing happens in Paris in late July. If the king could have
kept things calm around the Bastille for another three weeks,
France would still be a monarchy. - Adam Gopnik
09/2002:
Yes, but what if it were a parrot?
- Graham Chapman, to John Cleese
10/2002:
How can anyone be expected to govern a country with two
hundred and forty-six cheeses? - Charles de Gaulle
11/2002:
It is not easy, these days, to go beyond the bounds of taste.
- Paul Goldberger
12/2002:
It is impossible to design a system so perfect that
no one needs to be good. - T. S. Eliot
01/2003:
Well. . .old people with really good memories think I'm
clever. So there!! - Huey Freeman (Aaron McGruder)
02/2003:
A retired physicist reading the /Encyclopaedia Britannica/
can do just so much toward securing world peace.
- Brian Hayes
03/2003:
It's impossible to awaken a man who is pretending to be asleep.
- Navajo saying
04/2003:
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which,
when you looked at it in the right way, did not become
still more complicated. - Poul Anderson
05/2003:
The asking of questions is in itself the correct rite.
- Confucius
06/2003:
Not only in research, but in the everyday world of politics and
economics, we would all be better off if more people realized that
simple systems do not necessarily possess simple dynamical properties.
- Robert May
07/2003:
It is necessary to be slightly underemployed if you want to
do something significant. - James D. Watson
08/2003:
In general, a standard is very useful, whether it's
de facto or du jour. - Microsoft's Greg Sullivan
as misquoted by News.Com
09/2003:
There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool
until he has stopped asking questions.
- Charles P. Steinmetz
10/2003:
There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old,
and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and
therefore better." - Dean William Inge
11/2003:
I was going for a fair dose of irony and satire, and what
could be better than using Powerpoint and a projector?
- David Byrne
12/2003:
Logic doesn't apply to the real world. - Marvin Minsky
01/2004:
No *good* model ever accounted for *all* the facts, since
some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong.
- James D. Watson
02/2004:
The *world* is arbitrary. *Individuals* are either fair
or unfair. Which are you? - Caulfield (Jef Mallett)
03/2004:
The supreme misfortune is when theory outstrips performance.
- Leonardo da Vinci
04/2004:
Hate to interrupt with a spelling flame, but it's "Cheney,"
not "Chaney." It may only be one letter, but it's 998 faces.
- Mike Peterson
05/2004:
If we had cloned Saddam, we could capture him over and over
whenever we felt bad about the situation in Iraq.
- Sylvia (Nicole Hollander)
06/2004:
Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime
in this century unless we can find a way to live without
fossil fuels. - David Goodstein
07/2004:
The scientific mind does not so much provide the right
answers as ask the right questions.
- Claude Levi-Strauss
08/2004:
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it
is the merger of state and corporate power.
- Benito Mussolini
09/2004:
The danger to society is not merely that it should believe
wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should
become credulous. - William K. Clifford
10/2004:
When my information changes, I change my opinion.
What do you do, Sir? - John Maynard Keynes
11/2004:
Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without
learning is dangerous. - Confucius
12/2004:
You should always save hyperbole until you really need it.
- Hobbes (Bill Watterson)
01/2005:
Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.
- Marie Ebner von Eschenbach
02/2005:
People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing
or up to mischief. - Sir Peter Medawar
03/2005:
All creativity is an extended form of a joke.
- Alan Kay
04/2005:
All artists in all fields despise all critics
all the time. - Adam Gopnik
05/2005:
Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go
on forever in a finite world is either a madman or
an economist. - Kenneth Boulding
06/2005:
The joy of writing a comic strip about a middle-age couple
is, I'm never far from the subjects of demise and mortality.
The jokes just write themselves! - Jimmy Johnson
07/2005:
It is difficult for men in high office to avoid
the malady of self-delusion. - Calvin Coolidge
08/2005:
We'd like to do away with much of the health care system.
We'd like to keep people healthy until they suddenly go up
in a puff of smoke. - Charles Cantor
09/2005:
Right now America is a superpower living on credit -
something I don't think has happened since Philip II
ruled Spain. - Paul Krugman
10/2005:
The most important of all medical discoveries is not antibiotics,
or immunization; it is the randomized double-blind test, by means
of which we find out what works and what doesn't. - Robert Park
11/2005:
Of course a weed-puller isn't of much *use* in the Garden
of Eden, but it takes a while to figure that out.
- Tim Peters
12/2005:
If it made sense, that would be a very powerful idea.
- Bruce Eric Kaplan
01/2006:
Those who can make you believe absurdities
can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
02/2006:
The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe,
is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
- H. L. Mencken
03/2006:
Archimedes constructing his circle pays with his life
for his defective biological adaptation to immediate
circumstances. - Ernst Mach
04/2006:
An information system based on theory isolated from reality
is bound to fail. - Mitch Kabay
05/2006:
It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.
- Anatole France
06/2006:
The road to technology centered systems is paved
with user centered intentions. - David Woods
07/2006:
Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public;
ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.
- Vilhjalmur Stefansson
08/2006:
If you don't apply it when it's inconvenient
it's not a rule of law. - Admiral John Hutson
09/2006:
Numbers like 8 and 9 are useless for coding - everything
beyond 0 and 1 implies a flawed design. - Ville Vainio
10/2006:
This is a great country, in no small part because it is the
best country ever devised in which to be a public crank.
- Charles P. Pierce
11/2006:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace
alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an
endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
- H. L. Mencken
12/2006:
The Trinity is one of the most sublime mysteries of our holy
religion. In rejecting it because it is incomprehensible,
Unitarians betray their inadequate sense of theological
fundamentals. - Ambrose Bierce
01/2007:
Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this:
that you are dreadfully like other people.
- James Russell Lowell
02/2007:
I'd love to see a fine painting by Titian or Leonardo
that was really silly - a Venus with false nose and
glasses and duck feet. - B[ernard] Kliban
03/2007:
Every 10 years we say to ourselves, "If only we had
done the right thing 10 years ago."
- Thomas Friedman
04/2007:
An ideology has axioms and algorithms; a view of life
has approaches and approximations. - Adam Gopnik
05/2007:
My spider sense is tingling! I think we should
leave the country! - Roger (Maritza Campos)
06/2007:
You can hardly learn more about someone than by looking
at the lies he tells himself. - Jonathan Rauch
07/2007:
God help this nation when it has a President
who doesn't know as much about the military as I do.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
08/2007:
The greatest problem with communication is the illusion
that it has been accomplished. - George Bernard Shaw
09/2007:
Economics is a powerful tool, but like a microscope it focuses
attention on some aspects of reality (especially the role of
prices in markets), while it also diverts attention from other
aspects. - George Akerlof, 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics
10/2007:
Hanging out in bad bars waiting for sources to show up is a
time-honored tradition in journalism. - Douglas McCollam
11/2007:
Like many people, I started blogging out of
an urgent need to procrastinate. - Alex Ross
12/2007:
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for
taking things for granted. - Aldous Huxley
01/2008:
Never send anthromorphic animals to do a mother's job.
- Sabrina Tanzini (Corey Pandolph)
02/2008:
Hopefully every Bush press conference will devolve into
nonsensical Dadaist performance art involving fish,
collages, and angry repudiations of accepted scientific
views of climate change. - Josh Fruhlinger
03/2008:
Through the years, I have learned that there is no
harm in charging oneself up with delusions between
moments of valid inspiration. - Steve Martin
04/2008:
This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a
ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite
of what is usual in economics. - Paul Krugman
05/2008:
Life was simple before World War II. After that,
we had systems. - Admiral Grace Hopper
06/2008:
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their
willingness to believe, but in proportion to their
readiness to doubt. - H. L. Mencken
07/2008:
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is
dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
- Clarence Darrow
08/2008:
I love to draw. I loved to draw a lot more
before I became a cartoonist. - Aaron McGruder
09/2008:
The capacity to wreak destruction with your models
provides the ultimate respectability.
- Emanuel Derman
10/2008:
I've always believed that America's government was a
unique political system - one designed by geniuses so
that it could be run by idiots. I was wrong.
- Thomas Friedman
11/2008:
I do not believe in conspiracy theories, though
I do know that there is a secret international
organization that invents them. - Mike Lawrence
12/2008:
Think how hard physics would be if particles could think.
- Murray Gell-Mann
01/2009:
There's nothing that has a shorter shelf life than
an angry cartoon about presidents. - Art Spiegelman
02/2009:
Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.
- H. H. Williams
03/2009:
The term "powerful blogger" causes my logic
interpretation matrix to crash.
- TOBY, Robot Satan (Corey Pandolph)
04/2009:
Never express yourself more clearly
than you are able to think. - Niels Bohr
05/2009:
Made up words don't belong in a collabulary.
- Michael Shepherd
06/2009:
Almost everyone who talks about "flat earth" does not realize
that it is overoptimized to the point of maximal vulnerability.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
07/2009:
The grand edifice of brand-name consumerism rests on the
narcissistic fantasy that everyone else cares about what
we buy. - John Tierney
08/2009:
As time goes on the technical problems become
more automatic, while the people problems
become more surrealistic. - Henry Barnes
09/2009:
Sometimes I mistake your existential crises
for technical insights. - Randall Munroe
10/2009:
Don't worry about people stealing an idea.
If it's original you will have to ram it
down their throats. - Howard Aiken
11/2009:
Not knowing is much more interesting than believing
an answer that might be wrong. - Richard Feynman
12/2009:
What's the point of having a blog if you can't write
about things that aren't interesting to anybody else?
- Josh Fruhlinger
01/2010:
Low effectiveness is a general characteristic of organizations.
- Amitai Etzioni
02/2010:
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
- James Thurber
03/2010:
The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry
is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering
gains made by the computer hardware industry.
- Henry Petroski
04/2010:
Only in America could the failure to promote oneself
be widely regarded as arrogance. - Garry Trudeau
05/2010:
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.
- Frank Zappa
06/2010:
In physics there may one day be a Theory of Everything;
in finance and the social sciences, you're lucky if there
is a usable theory of anything. - Emanuel Derman
07/2010:
I'm not proud of that. Okay, maybe I am, but I'm
not proud that I'm proud of it. - J. D. Baldwin
08/2010:
You'll never find a programming language that frees you
from the burden of clarifying your ideas.
- Randall Munroe
09/2910:
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
- Francis Bacon
10/2010:
If you don't like the Democratic Party's Republican policies,
think how much you'll hate the Republican Party's Republican
policies. - Ted Rall
11/2010:
The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in
the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
- H. L. Mencken
12/2010:
If ignorance is bliss then why are the ignorant so angry?
- Shannon Wheeler
01/2011:
Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly
paid industry when it's just a utility, like sewage or gas?
- Paul Woolley
02/2011:
Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success,
only his failure. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
03/2011:
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
- Voltaire
04/2011:
Whenever someone says there is less than a one-in-a-million chance
of a complex system failing, there is more than a one-in-a-million
chance they have made unjustified assumptions in their estimate.
- Matthew Bunn
05/2011:
Did you know that dogs have 35 words for "wag," but only one
word for "anti-establishment"? - Nocturna (Paul Gilligan)
06/2011:
Only the naïve, inexperienced administrator would assume that
orders properly issued will as a rule be properly carried out.
- Amatai Etzioni
07/2011:
If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers,
the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them
with copies of /The Elements of Style/. The first-greatest,
of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.
- Dorothy Parker
08/2011:
The army made a satirist out of me. - Jules Feiffer
09/2011:
In science you need to understand the world; in business
you need others to misunderstand it. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
10/2011:
I've noticed that students who have great difficulty
arguing cogently about philosophical questions I raise in
class nevertheless develop very sophisticated cases for
being allowed to turn a paper in late. - Gary Gutting
11/2011:
Mom says he has paternal explanatory syndrome, or drivelalia
factosis, caused by a buildup of useless information in the
brain. - Alice Otterloop (Richard Thompson)
12/2011:
The very ideal of the patent grievously distorts
the technological process. - Brooke Hindle
01/2012:
The boom, not the slump, is the right time for
austerity at the Treasury. - John Maynard Keynes
02/2012:
Remember, kids! In order to maintain an untenable position,
you have to be actively ignorant. - Stephen Colbert
03/2012:
I decided that behaving ethically was the most nihilistic thing
I could do. - Paul Pavel
04/2012:
When I was young and naïve, I believed that important people
took positions based on careful consideration of the options.
Now I know better. - Paul Krugman
05/2012:
Your theory is interesting, but it hardly disproves
what I want to believe. - Gil (Norm Feuti)
06/2012:
Sometimes you think you're standing on the shoulders of
giants, but it's really just an unstable stack of dwarves.
- Nick Gentile
07/2012:
I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise.
- Noel Coward
08/2012:
Calls for a diversified intellectual portfolio fall flat when the
conservative assets on offer are intellectual shell corporations.
- Brad DeLong
09/2012:
Perhaps there is pleasure in wealth only if there are
poor for comparison. - Robert L. Park
10/2012:
The true measure of a man is what he would do if he knew
he would never be caught. - William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
11/2012:
There's a unanimity of gullibility out there.
- Clifford Irving
12/2012:
I cannot understand what it means to call a theory beautiful
if it is not true. - Niels Bohr
01/2013:
Education is what survives when what has been learnt has
been forgotten. - B. F. Skinner
02/2013:
Sometimes sarcasm helps us think more clearly.
- Dogbert (Scott Adams)
03/2013:
What all this comes down to, of course, is that a common currency
has a much better chance of working if you actually have a nation.
- Paul Krugman
04/2013:
Some day, historians are going to look back on the 2012
Republican presidential campaign and think that we made it all up.
- Charles P. Pierce
05/2013:
Man will become better when you show him what he is like.
- Anton Chekhov
06/2013:
Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a
secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our
ignorance. - Daniel Kahneman
07/2013:
The system that unconsciously generates moral judgments
is immune to religious doctrine. - Marc Hauser
08/2013:
The only way for anyone to make any money managing your savings
is to try and trick you into making trades you shouldn't make,
or buying products you shouldn't buy. - Matt Yglesias
09/2013:
We humans are hard-wired for tribalism, not
Bayesian rationality. - Noah Smith
10/2013:
Isn't it amazing how a large number of evil morons
can give the appearance of being a single evil genius?
- Mel Rimmer
11/2013:
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is
when you are thinking about it. - Daniel Kahneman
12/2013:
Don't worry about selling out. Worry about buying in.
- Guillermo Del Toro
01/2014:
Annoyance is a fungible commodity.
- Caulfield (Jef Mallett)
02/2014:
In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million -
and I was angry because it wasn't big enough. I was 30
years old. . . . - Sam Polk
03/2014:
Vision without execution is hallucination.
- Thomas Edison
04/2014:
Moderate conservatism is too soggy to serve as fuel
for the conservative disinfotainment industry.
- John Holbo
05/2014:
One way in which CEOs justify their power is by claiming
the status of heroes, of brave, risk-taking leaders
rather than rent-seeking apparatchiks. - Chris Dillow
06/2014:
John Beresford Tipton was a little like the Koch brothers,
except his checks were smaller and the recipients were not
required to plot against solar energy. - Gail Collins
07/2014:
Old? I'm still keeping "mature" at bay.
- Edwin "Frazz" Frazier (Jef Mallett)
08/2014:
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it,
doesn't go away. - Philip K. Dick
09/2014:
Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will.
- Frederick Douglass
10/2014:
If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature,
but by our institutions, great is our sin. - Charles Darwin
11/2014:
Every individual is an exception to the rule. - Carl Jung
12/2014:
Whenever you identify with elites, pause for a second.
You're probably doing it wrong. - Duncan Black
01/2015:
The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be
ruined by praise than saved by criticism.
- Norman Vincent Peale
02/2015:
I am impressed by the unreliability of casual empiricism
conducted by idealogues. - Robert Waldmann
03/2015:
Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device
in the face of complexity. - Henry Louis Gates
04/2015:
The truth exists. Only fictions are invented.
- Georges Braque
05/2015:
When bank profits are high, that's a sign that the bank
in question is extracting rents from the economy,
rather than helping it to grow. - Brad DeLong
06/2015:
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
- George Orwell
07/2015:
Where there is smoke, there is fire. Or a smoke machine.
Or a giant badly rendered smoke-breathing toad from some
massive multiplayer online role-playing game.
- Noah Smith
08/2015:
Engineering is the art of doing that well with one dollar,
which any bungler can do with two after a fashion.
- Arthur Wellington
09/2015:
The inference from the unpredictability to the rationality
of stock prices is the most remarkable error in the history
of economic thought. - Robert Shiller
10/2015:
The tongue is the only instrument that gets
sharper with use. - Washington Irving
11/2015:
Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory?
They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.
- George Santayana
12/2015:
Reality is but a shared illusion. So if we all
think real hard there could be a lot more dragons.
- Ted Forth (Ces Marciuliano)
01/2016:
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks
he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires
no such conviction. - Harry Frankfurt
02/2016:
Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation
to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
- John Maynard Keynes
03/2016:
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen
that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses
slowly, one by one. - Charles Mackay
04/2016:
Economists are really good at inventing rational explanations
for behavior, no matter how dumb that behavior appears to be.
- Richard Thaler
05/2016:
Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions.
Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.
- Mort Sahl
06/2016:
Sometimes I wish I did not possess a theory of mind.
- Bubbles (Jeph Jacques)
07/2016:
The difference between doing something and doing nothing
is everything. - Daniel Berrigan
08/2016:
I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability
to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing.
- Daniel Kahneman
09/2016:
Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them
in order to gain public acceptance. - Daniel Davies
10/2016:
Figuring out how to do things is hard, but much harder
still is figuring out what to do next.
- Jonathan Rauch
11/2016:
Marx is a warning about what can happen when people
defy their parents and get a Ph.D. - Louis Menard
12/2016:
No matter how cynical you get it is impossible
to keep up. - Lily Tomlin
01/2017:
Just because you don't see killer robots marching
down the street doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned.
- Elon Musk
02/2017:
Railing against Obamacare was easy, but the responsibilities
of power have taken all the fun out of denying medical care
to the poor and sick. - Jonathan Chait
03/2017:
If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it
get us out? - Will Rogers
04/2017:
The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a
set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to
learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.
- Joan Robinson
05/2017:
Any chief-of-staff who isn't prepared to confiscate Trump's
Android, delete his Twitter account, and crush sedatives into
his food will fail to produce order. - Eric Levitz
06/2017:
Profit is sweet, even if it comes from deception.
- Sophocles (the Muse of Marketing, apparently)
07/2017:
I believe I am right. And, if not right, plausible.
- Ignatius Donnelly
08/2017:
Why do people say Putin is playing chess and Trump is playing
checkers when it is obvious Putin is playing poker and Trump
is playing Calvinball? Congressional Republicans, meanwhile,
are playing Jenga plus Hungry Hungry Hippos. - John Holbo
09/2017:
It is never a good idea to elect people who promise as many
as six impossible things before breakfast. - Simon Johnson
10/2017:
Whatever may be tolerated in monarchical and despotic governments,
no republic is safe that tolerates a privileged class.
- Frederick Douglass
11/2017:
Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy.
- Michael O'Donoghue
12/2017:
Piety is the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct.
- William James
01/2018:
What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man,
but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia
must be silent? - Richard Feynman
02/2018:
One's hope with this stuff is always that Trump
is lying. The more disturbing explanation is
that he's actually confused. - Matthew Yglesias
03/2018:
How many foxes does it take before a henhouse
becomes a foxhouse? - Charles P. Pierce
04/2018:
This quote is often falsely attributed to Mark Twain.
- Randall Munroe
05/2018:
Belief in a market economy in which the consumer is sovereign
is one of our most pervasive forms of fraud.
- John Kenneth Galbraith
06/2018:
The most costly of all follies is to believe
passionately in the palpably not true.
- H. L. Mencken
07/2018:
No dinner party is a success without at least one physicist.
- Joseph Jones
08/2018:
'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would
think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying,
'My mother, drunk or sober.' - G. K. Chesterton
09/2018:
The deep lesson of the notion of opportunity cost is that
every single second of your life is lived suboptimally.
- Zach Weinersmith
10/2018:
Fourteen years after it was founded, in Zuckerberg's dorm room,
Facebook has as many adherents as Christianity. - Evan Osnos
11/2018:
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power,
is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. - James Baldwin
12/2018:
I'm 70. 70 may be the new 50, but "dead" is not the new "alive."
- Bob Mankoff
01/2019:
Donald Trump is not a particularly unusual example
of a bullying, marginally competent corporate
bullshit artist. - Mike Peterson
02/2019:
In the real world, the best idea is always a compromise
between a good idea and a bad idea.
- Discount Santa (Jon Rosenberg)
03/2019:
The following five words are the best tip-off that you're about to
encounter an invalid citation: 'According to the Heritage Foundation...'
- Jonathan Chait
04/2019:
In macroeconomics, falsified theories never die, and their
proponents often don't acknowledge empirical failures.
- Noah Smith
05/2019:
Don't spend all your time thinking about quantum mechanics -
otherwise you will go crazy. - John Bell
06/2019:
I can't help that I was born privileged and oblivious.
- J. Barnard Pillsbury (Gene and Dan Weingarten)
07/2019:
Yes, we should strive toward a market that's rigged in the
least expensive, most transparent, most efficient, most stable
way possible. - Justin Fox
08/2019:
If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any
evidence of the bamboozle. Once you give a charlatan power
over you, you almost never get it back. - Carl Sagan
09/2019:
Interesting that the stories in the AARP magazine are all about
those 90-year-old mountain climbers while all the ads are for
people who can no longer bend over to tie their shoe laces.
- Mike Peterson
10/2019:
My father taught me that a job worth doing is worth doing right.
It is mind-boggling the number of jobs not worth doing and the
incalculable hours I've saved by not doing them.
- Jimmy Johnson
11/2019:
Lots of people called their ships unsinkable before the Titanic.
Voicing your hubris doesn't make failure more likely,
just more memorable. - Randall Munroe
12/2019:
I found a copy of /The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up/,
but the idea of reading it didn't spark joy,
so I gave it away. - Randall Munroe
01/2020:
If everyone would just resign themselves to the fact that we
exist in a Godless void with a chewy center of moral relativism
I think we'd all feel a lot better. - Philip (Jonathan Rosenberg)
02/2020:
The only thing worse than the systematic oppression of
minorities is having to talk about it for even one minute.
- Jamal Marcus (Tauhid Bondia)
03/2020:
Nonrational logic will not go away. - David Byrne
04/2020:
Why have citizens when you can have customers?
- Kaito Kusanagi (Aaron Diaz)
05/2020:
After a certain point in one's career, the worry that they'll
finally notice your true absence of talent morphs into worrying
that they'll finally notice that you've Lost It. - William Gibson
06/2020:
E Lengeege weth e smell nember ef vewels cen remeen
qeete expresseve. - Steven Pinker
07/2020:
The Internet of Things is a system in which the failure
of a computer you didn't even know existed can render
your own things unusable. - Martin Ward
08/2020:
Natural selection is a beguiling counterfeiter
of deliberate purpose. - Richard Dawkins
09/2020:
When all you have is a hammer every problem becomes a nail.
When all you have is the police every problem becomes a crime.
- Danielle Ponder
10/2020:
It's like he bought a copy of "Mussolini for Dummies"
but never made it past the first chapter. - Bret Stephens
11/2020:
Other pollsters complain about declining response rates, but our
poll showed that 96% of respondents would be 'somewhat likely'
or 'very likely' to agree to answer a series of questions
for a survey. - Randall Munroe
12/2020:
Perhaps flamenco guitar is ethically innocent of any tendency
to induce decay. - John Holbo
01/2021:
"Defund the Police" is polling terribly among people
who don't give a shit about police violence.
- nameless PR flack (Jon Rosenberg)
02/2021:
The center did not hold. However, the Gross National Product
continued to rise. - Walker Percy
03/2021:
Physics doesn't care if your question is weird. It just
gives you the answer, without judging. - Randall Munroe
04/2021:
Well, what's the worst that can happen? They'll beat
the shit out of us and throw us in jail. - Hal Ashby
05/2021:
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately
it kills all its pupils - Hector Berlioz
06/2021:
If mockery could solve our problems, we’d have no problems at all.
And then the political cartoonists would all be out of business.
- Mike Peterson
07/2021:
We rejected the inclusion of burnout in DSM-IV, because it is
inherent to the human condition, not a psychiatric disorder.
- Allen Frances
08/2021:
What's Latin for "If you seek to make the facile sound profound,
we're your language"? - unnamed student (Jef Mallett)
09/2021:
Poverty is a choice made by governments not individuals.
- Fiona the Unemployed Bettong (Andrew Marlton)
10/2021:
I doubt that there’s something about British culture
that makes the country especially good at lipids.
- Paul Krugman
11/2021:
The best I can do is freak out in moderation. - Bob Mankoff
12/2021:
I love being told I'm growing up wrong by people I don't want
to turn out like. - Caulfield (Jef Mallett)
01/2022:
As for behavior, I have shocking news: Physicists can be arrogant.
- Mike Tamor
02/2022:
An object is a monotonous process. - Nelson Goodman
03/2022:
A vital part of my job is to render soporific subjects
into gripping prose. - Idrees Kahloon
04/2022:
When we get introspective, the terrorists win.
- Bus Stop Guy (Darrin Bell)
05/2022:
COBOL could be here forever. Thus, Y2K+N problems are
likely to recur for all nonnegative integer values of N.
- Peter G. Neumann
06/2022:
It's not a lie if they don't believe you.
- Willy (Joe Martin)
07/2022:
Optimism is fine, at least until they start
transporting animals in pairs to Cape Canaveral.
- Frank Stewart
08/2022:
There's no nondestructive test for indestructibility.
- Randall Munroe
09/2022:
A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on
unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance
of unsuspecting musicians. - Frank Zappa
10/2022:
Honestly, I don't know why anyone is allowed to own a car,
without a basic understanding of physics.
- Caulfield (Jef Mallett)
11/2022:
Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which
by reasoning he never acquired: for in the course of things,
men always grow vicious before they become unbelievers.
- Jonathan Swift
12/2022:
Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without
expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.
- Kurt Vonnegut
01/2023:
Nobody has come up with significant real-world uses for
cryptocurrency other than money-laundering.
- Paul Krugman
02/2023:
The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence,
rather a condition of it. - Friedrich Nietzsche
03/2023:
"Incineration of organic matter within it" is
a bad feature for an umbrella. - Randall Munroe
04/2023
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows
how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
- James Baldwin
05/2023:
I know I’ve put on a lot of weight lately but being told
that I look like Steve Bannon by an 80 year-old buddhist
was the last straw. - Bobby London
06/2023:
Copyright law cannot stop the revolution! It's clobberin' time!!
- Michael Caesar (Aaron McGruder)
07/2023:
[T]he institution of American policing lies outside
any meaningful democratic control. - Jamelle Bouie
08/2023:
Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.
- Henry Petroski
09/2023:
All American business schools should have a class on mug shots.
- Maureen Dowd
10/2023:
Human existence is based upon two pillars: Compassion and knowledge.
Compassion without knowledge is ineffective; knowledge
without compassion is inhuman. - Victor Weisskopf
11/2023:
It is the dice, in fact, that play God with the universe.
- King Luca (Darren Bleuel)
12/2023:
The great charm of cats is their rampant egotism,
their devil-may-care attitude toward responsibility,
their disinclination to earn an honest dollar.
- Robertson Davies
01/2024:
Dress for the job you want, not the job you have, assuming that
the job you want is not one in which you get to lounge around
your apartment naked. - Colin Stokes
02/2024:
I have tried to bring scientific thinking to literary criticism,
and there's been very little gratitude for this.
- Kurt Vonnegut
03/2024
Everything that needs to be said has already been said.
But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
- André Gide