• “I have a very wide violence background. I’m a violence professional, if you will.”–F. Braun McAsh
  • “I’ve often said that the difference between British and American SF TV series is that the British ones have three-dimensional characters and cardboard spaceships, while the Americans do it the other way around.”–Ross Smith
  • “Raise hell – big time. I want y’all to get out there and raise hell about damned near everything. My word, there’s a world out there that needs fixing. Get out there and get after it.”–Molly Ivins
  • “The thing is this: You got to have fun while you’re fightin’ for freedom, ’cause you don’t always win.”–Molly Ivins
  • “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”–James D. Nicoll, on rassf
  • “English is The Borg of languages. ‘Your vocabulary and metaphorical expression shall be assimilated and added to our collective.'”–Mark Horning
  • “If you’ve never walked into a lamppost, you’re wasting valuable reading time.”–Eloise Beltz-Decker
  • “Now, now, perl certainly has its place…as the Swiss-army chainsaw of the programming world.”–Garrett Fitzgerald
  • “Anyway, the America that’s worth fighting for is one in which we can call our President a royalist scum-sucking halfwit who stole the election, and do so while holding our flag high. That’s America and I’m for it. “–Patrick Nielsen Hayden
  • “If you do not climb you will not fall. This is true. But is it so bad to fail, that hard to fall? Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes…you learn to fly.”–Neil Gaiman
  • “All baseball needs to be interesting is a good book, a TV, and a baseball fan. You sit and read your good book, and when your baseball fan starts making noise, you look up and see the interesting thing on instant replay.”–Ailsa C. Ek, on rassf
  • “God gave us the Internet so we could have artistic freedom. Satan gave us commercial markets so we could sell out and feed our families.”–Mike Peterson, in rec.arts.comics.strips
  • “Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.”–Teresa Nielsen Hayden
  • “A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”–Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “sendmail.cf does not resemble line noise. It resembles the result of somebody banging his head on the keyboard. Anybody who has worked with it will understand why.”–Seth Breidbart
  • “I want to move to theory. Everything works in theory.”–Nancy Lebovitz
  • “Sir, I am an Englishman, and irony, like the sea, is in our blood. It is embedded in our genes, an immutable echo of our ancient ancestry, and binds us irrevocably to the land of our birth.”–David G. Bell, in rasff
  • “Whenever people say we mustn’t be sentimental, you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And, if they add, we must be realistic, they mean they are going to make money out of it.”– Brigid Brophy
  • “There are only 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.”–Anonymous
  • “When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.”–Francois de la Rouchefoucauld
  • “The Internet was invented so that you can find someone else’s review of ‘Scooby-Doo.'”–Roger Ebert
  • “Snowmen fall from Heaven unassembled.”–Chris Greville
  • “I’d never seen anything like it. I think it’s amazing, and I don’t know if I can do it justice. Putting it bluntly, if I fuck it up, I’ll fuck it up with respect and love.”–Neil Gaiman, on writing the english screenplay for “Princess Mononoke”
  • “The biggest problem with getting older is missing those who don’t.”–Alan Woodford, in rasff
  • “Books you’ve bought and shelved but not yet read emit a gentle, beneficial radiation, and when you finally do read them they’re almost old friends.”–Teresa Nielsen Hayden on RASFF (found in Rick Keir’s .sig)
  • “Any sufficiently advanced filk convention is indistinguishable from magic.”–Paul Ciszek, in rec.music.filk
  • “I don’t pretend to be an expert on intellectual property law, but I do know one thing. If a music industry executive claims I should agree with their agenda because it will make me more money, I put my hand on my wallet…and check it after they leave, just to make sure nothing’s missing.”–Janis Ian
  • “Their doom, of course, is coming. Far far away, almost too faint to hear, and impossible to tell how long it will be in coming, we perceive the slap, slap, slap of a web-footed revolutionary army.”–Dorothy J. Heydt, on rassff
  • “Information doesn’t want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.”– Larry Wall
  • “Words trail cultural meanings like invisible coattails.”–Margaret Young, in rasff
  • “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world, and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”–E. B. White
  • “Thoughts are like winds. Language is learning to tack.”–Heather Nicoll, in rasff
  • “The whole valve amplifier thing has always amused me — the afficianados are paying premium prices to corrupt the pure signal they spent premium prices to achieve.”–Robert Sneddon, in rasff
  • “The traditional Christian heaven doesn’t sound very interesting, since it obviously doesn’t have Internet access.”–Keith F. Lynch, in rasff
  • “There have been so many changes in “what is good for you” and “what you should never eat” in the past 20 years or so, I figure I’ll eat what I please; sooner or later somebody will find out it’s good for me.”–Steve Smith, in rasff
  • “Did I really just say sex is like Morris dancing?”–Jo Walton, in rasff
  • “…the Montreal reputation for having the worst drivers in Canada was undeserved. Sure, Montreal drivers all drove like maniacs, but at least they drove like maniacs who knew what they were doing. As near as he could figure, Toronto drivers had their heads so far up their collective arse they had to make it up as they went along.”–Tanya Huff
  • “There’s a particular facial expression intelligent people get, when they have to explain stupid decisions their boss has made.”–Ny Martin
  • “It sure is. The only thing worse than a conservative is a liberal. And vice-versa.”–Wheat Cracker Experience, in rec.arts.comics.strips
  • “To see people dismiss “politics” as a topic no more compelling than golf or the latest sitcom is very frightening. It’s like someone walking across a superhighway but casually saying that they aren’t interested in automobiles so they don’t bother to look.”–Mike Peterson, in rec.arts.comics.strips
  • “Into what? I retired at 21 or whenever I decided to become a musician. What do I retire into? Accounting. I will retire into accounting, maybe.”–David Bowie, asked if he ever thinks of retiring
  • “The west is being devoured by grasshoppers.”–Aileen Carlstrom
  • “‘Stuart Little 2,’ ‘Perdition’ go neck and neck”–Headline on CNN.com
  • “[Commercial radio] is owned by one or two corporations now, and they’re not in the music business. They’re in the advertising business. So let’s not kid ourselves. If you want to hear music, go buy a guitar.”–Elvis Costello
  • “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Give a man a bible, and it’ll probably take him a week or two to eat it all.”–Huey Callison in alt.fan.cecil-adams
  • “I don’t date women who require constant flattery and proclamations of loyalty, and I don’t wish to live in a nation that requires the same either.”–Vinzago
  • “France is actually really small, so they shrink the cars and people as the tube goes further from England. This makes France seem huge, whereas it’s actually about the size of a coffee table.”–Gavin Whittaker
  • “We like to think of the Internet as reliable. It’s not. It is redundant, which is why packets almost always make it, eventually, but it’s not reliable.”–Erik Olsen, on SMOFS
  • “Economy is not life. Free market is not freedom.”–Sam Hutcheson
  • “‘Morituri Nolumus Mori’ – We who are about to die don’t want to.”–Terry Prachett
  • “Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.”–Kathleen Norris
  • “I would be most happy if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists of building enough bookshelves.”–Anna Quindlen
  • “Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”–Anais Nin
  • “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.”–Henry David Thoreau
  • “I figure if I can’t put the fear of God into them, I can at least put the fear of me into them.”–Islander, on plastic.com
  • “I’ve lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can’t figure out where in my apartment it is.”–erno
  • “As convenient as it is for information to come to us, libraries do have a valuable side effect: they force all of the smart people to come together in one place where they can interact with one another.”– Neal Stephenson
  • “He makes the point in this column that the government is the employee of the American people. We’re the boss. And I realized, while reading it, that specifically we’re the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert. We want to government to do amazing things for us, brilliantly and without flaw, for free. “–Avram Grumer, in rasff
  • “”I think when people get on the Internet their common sense may be weakened if not suspended.”–Charles Harwood
  • “Jesus was provided for by his Father. I suspect the same is the case with many of those writing on the web.”–Michael Mendelsohn
  • “I wonder if I can sue the author for lost resources. I could have spent that time painting my toenails, or sanding the cat, or alphabetizing my stuffed animals.”–Becky Schoenberg
  • “Christian Biblical literalists are trusting themselves to an archaic English translation of a Latin translation of (help me here) Greek? Aramaic? source. I wouldn’t even trust a VCR manual to make it through that intact.”–Dr. Dee
  • “I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth, just so long as whatever it is you’re crusading against fits my personal notion of worthy cause.”–Sam Hutcheson
  • “It is all right to hold a conversation, but you should let go of it now and then.”–Richard Armour
  • “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”–Rabbi Harold Kushner
  • “The only problem with having been volunteer crew for public tv, was bottoming-out my suspension of disbelief when I realized that a video mixer console destroyed Alderaan.”–Dave Wegener
  • “The most critical aspect of a security measure is not how well it works but how well it fails.”–Bruce Schneier
  • “The copy I got had been forwarded enough times that it was well on its way to being trace alphanumerics in a sea of greater-than marks, the heat death of email chain letters.”–Avram Grumer
  • “Sometimes I think the “blogosphere” functions as a machine for reassuring righties that all left types are as crazy as the ditziest college lesbo-vegan, and reassuring lefties that all right-wingers are barely suppressed maniacs who live on ammunition and raw meat.”–Patrick Nielsen Hayden
  • “Brainstorm. Go wild. Think outside the box, because inside the box it’s too dark, and there may or may not be a dead cat to deal with.”–Paul Bristow, on FILK_UK
  • “We know that you believe you understand what you think we said, but we are not sure you realize that what you heard is not what we meant.”–Stealers Wheel
  • “Vah! Denuone Latine loquebar? Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur.” (“Oh! Was I speaking Latin again? Silly me. Sometimes it just sort of slips out.”)–Bruce Kahl
  • “Truly it is said that fandom is a creature with an infinitely short attention span and an infinitely long memory.”–Patrick Nielsen Hayden
  • “And ‘guy you’ve never heard of gets more people in his book-signing line than anyone else’ is much less anecdotally interesting than ‘Charlotte Square Covered by Menacing People in Black’.”–Neil Gaiman
  • “Memo to self: even if you don’t think you’re going to win, write a speech. Otherwise you will wind up on the stage in front of several thousand people, finishing an impromptu speech with ‘Fuck, I got a Hugo.'”–Neil Gaiman
  • “Nobody ever got hurt trying. Unless they were trying something dangerous.”–Jon Carlstrom
  • “I decided “doppio espresso” probably wasn’t going to cut it at the airport Starbuck’s in Portland, Oregon. So I was gentle with the spotty lad behind the counter and asked for a “short black”. Inexplicably, I was handed a six-litre milkshake container full of almost-boiling grey bilge which smelt disconcertingly like my eleven-year-old cat.”–R.H. Draney
  • “Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.”–Larry Wall
  • “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
  • “It’s hard for me to get angry at people who spend their free time trying to save my soul. They’re not gonna do it, but I think it’s nice that they care enough about other people to try.”–Tony Meyers
  • “The Internet sucks so bad it’s only a matter of time before it generates a Schwarzschild radius or warp field which will engulf the planet and put me out of my misery. Centuries hence, galactic astronomers will visit and plant another “This civilization destroyed itself with keyboards” beacon in orbit around the sun.”–Kevin Goebel
  • “English is generally considered a Germanic language. Although this is probably only because “mishmash” isn’t a recognised category.”–Thorsten Michels
  • “If it can be conceived as music, it can be executed as music, and presented to an audience in such a way that they will perceive it as music: “Look at this. Ever seen one of these before? I built this for you. What do you mean, ‘What the fuck is it?’ It’s a goddam ETUDE, asshole.””–Frank Zappa
  • “I used to do chain sonnets. In fact, I was up to 3 or 4 packs of sonnets a day. Then that Surgeon General warning came out, and I quit cold turkey.”–Theodric
  • “It has been a life-long dream to start the first Pirate Rap band, which would take advantage of the combined bad-assitude, homocidal mania, and parent-annoyingness of inner city hoodlums and 18th-century privateers.”–Andrew Northrup
  • “More from the president: “We have no specific threat to America, but we’re taking everything seriously.” I love this man. No, really. Everything he says sounds like a Zen koan or an acid revelation. You can ponder his words for hours, and you’ll never quite make sense of them, but maybe, just maybe, you’ll attain enlightenment.”–Jesse Walker
  • “Trees don’t pay taxes.”–Larissa March
  • “I always thought that Finnish was the sort of language people would come up with when they had 150 days of winter with 18 hour nights and no television.”–Damien Warman
  • “You’re so self-centered, light bends around you.”–Iarnariel
  • “Part of my problem is I still think of sex as a fun way to say Hello and get to know new friends.”–Heather
  • “Of course you can never have enough RCA cables.”–Mary Crowell
  • “of course he has no idea what you’re talking about. no one, with the possible exception of the satanic jack russel terrier living in your neighbor’s back yard, has a fucking clue what you’re talking about.”–Sam Hucheson
  • “TV does not kill the imagination; though given some of the weirder slash pairings I’ve seen or heard from, I’m not sure it wouldn’t be better if it DID on occasion.”–Kay Shapero
  • “The First Amendment does not say that there is freedom of expression provided the talk is not ‘dangerous.’ It does not say that there is freedom of expression provided the utterance has no tendency to subvert. It does not put free speech and freedom of the press in the category of housing, sanitation, hours of work, factory conditions, and the like, and makes it subject to regulation for the public good. Nor does it permit legislative restraint of freedom of expression so long as the regulation does not offend due process. All notions of regulation or restraint by government are absent from the First Amendment. For it says in words that are unambiguous, ‘Congress shall make no law.. abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..'”–Late Supreme Court Justice, William O Douglas.
  • “You can never entirely stop being what you once were. That’s why it’s important to be the right person today, and not put it off till tomorrow.”–Larry Wall
  • “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.”–Basho
  • “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”–Theodore Roosevelt
  • “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable ones, and then starting on the first one.”–Mark Twain
  • “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essense, is Fascism: Ownerhips of government by an indiviual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”–Franklin D. Roosevelt
  • “The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think that it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds can be. It goes up and down and round and round. It has many thrills and chills & is very brightly coloured, and it’s fun. For a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and begin to question: Is this real or is this just a ride? And others have remembered and they come back to us and say ‘Hey, don’t ever be afraid, because…It’s just a ride’. We can change it anytime we want to. No effort, just a choice. No job, no money, no savings, just a choice right now. Between Fear and Love. It’s just a ride folks….”–Bill Hicks
  • “Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.”– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • “Sleep is good. That’s where I get to be a Viking!”–Angie Burke, quoting the Simpsons
  • “It’s impossible to offend Unitarians. They are flattered that you thought them openminded enough to be able to handle it.”–Mike Peterson
  • “There’s life, and there’s music, and music endures.”–Patrick Nielsen Hayden
  • “The torch of doubt and chaos, this is what the sage steers by”–Chuang-Tzu
  • “The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in. We’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.”–Nathaniel Borenstein
  • “Cartoonists rummage through the junk drawer of the mind with a flashlight.”–Brooke McEldowney
  • “Somehow I don’t think the galaxy is going to be settled by the Amish.”–Doug Jacobs
  • “Sometimes the giant hamster of misfortune doesn’t seem to want to run on anybody’s wheel but yours.”–George Olson
  • “Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”–Ezra Pound
  • “As a SysAdmin, yes, I CAN read your e-mail, but I DON’T get that bored.”–John R. Campbell
  • “There is more merit in the world than any one of us are going to discover before we die.”–Jim Henley
  • “My ex and I agree the secret of our chummy relationship is not living together since 1967.”–Carol Frilegh
  • “It’s a sad day when puppets kick your ass.”–David B.
  • “If you want me to treat your ideas with more respect, get some better ideas.”–John Scalzi
  • “So presumptuous of you. My fair trade organic shade-grown songbird-saving coffee is roasted with solar power, then flown northwards via African Swallow, where I grind it in my mortar and pestle (which is fashioned from local marble quarried by indigenous peoples) and prepare it in my wind- powered espresso machine (which is built of hemp and recycled metal, the latter sustainably harvested from SUV dealerships that’d been visited by vegan arsonists).”–Jym Dyer
  • “Watching the Sci-Fi Channel is like the Playboy Channel if it was run by your local PTA.”–Rob Myers
  • “But that’s the thing about losing your youth. All your touchstones start dropping away into dark water. And I live on a river.”–Warren Ellis
  • “You are not a failure until you stop trying.”–Carol Frilegh
  • “It has suddenly become clear to me that all of my problems can be directly traced to the fact that my life is not choreographed by Bob Fosse.”–Becky Schoenberg
  • “I haven’t felt quite this dizzy in quite this way since the day I found out how *many* Christian BDSM sites there are on the web.”–Teresa Nielsen Hayden
  • “More and more, Bush & Co. remind me of Jim Macdonald’s definition of the difference between a goat-roping and a clusterfuck–those being occasions of complete fiasco, transcending all degrees of snafu–which is that one is fun to watch, and the other isn’t.”–Teresa Nielsen Hayden
  • “This world needs more projectile ice cream.”–Adam Selzer
  • “There is a generation of women getting older who started the sexual revolution. They bought vibrators, read the Kama Sutra and when their sex lives aren’t good they get pissed off about it.”–Dr. Andrew Goldstein
  • “The more things stay, the more they change the sane.”–Terence Chua
  • “Economists can certainly disappoint you. One said that the economy would turn up by the last quarter. Well, I’m down to mine and it hasn’t.”–Robert Orben
  • “Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired (by passionate devotion to them) produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity … we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.”–A.E. Newton
  • “What makes a culture healthy is not this or that opinion, it’s the conversations, the arguments, the debates a culture fosters, and the healthier a culture, the sharper and broader the debates.”–Dana Gioia
  • “If we put everybody in jail who has a fetish, we wouldn’t have anyone running our government.”–Ted McIlvenna
  • “The advent of the internet has made so many things possible. Self- published recreational journalism has always been around; but back when you had to at least learn to run a mimeograph, and you had to pay postage to distribute your deathless prose, people who didn’t actually have much to say for themselves found other hobbies”–Teresa Nielsen Hayden
  • “Occasional bad sex is regrettable, but bad chocolate is a betrayal.”–John Scalzi
  • “Sir Issac Newton once said ‘If I have seen further than you, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.’ W could see a lot farther by just pulling his head out of his ass.”–Olz, on President Bush
  • “Without the constant tug-of-war between the zealous and the cautious, I suspect most human cultures wouldn’t have advanced very far.”–Pat Kight
  • “Getting a democracy is rather like getting a mammal for a gift. Kittens are nice. Wolverines will lunch on your eyeballs. You don’t drop a wolverine in your friend’s lap, and then walk away feeling you’ve done them a favor, since the best pets are mammals. Democracy names a vast range of possible institutional structures.”–Will Wilkinson
  • “The film demonstrates, ‘Matrix’-style, that a well-trained fighter can leap into the air and levitate while spinning dozens of times, although why anyone would want to do this is never explained.”–Roger Ebert, on Bulletproof Monk
  • “It’s a revolving door and there’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘This was the moment.’ Sometimes, the moment is cool.”–Mike Peterson
  • “I am a citizen of the moment, I’ve built my white picket fence around ‘the now’, with a commanding view of ‘the soon to be.’ Does it really matter? Does it really anti-matter?”–The Tick
  • “I don’t really care where I live, as long as I have broadband.”–Scott Helms
  • “There’s nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.”–Johann Sebastian Bach
  • “By which I mean that you can look at Kodi and say to yourself, ‘I believe this is an animal descended from packs of killers that brought down bears and moose.’ As opposed to, say, a Shih Tzu, at which you look and say to yourself ‘This is what happens when you put a mop and a stuffed animal in a room with a Barry White CD.'”–John Scalzi
  • “Nobody can really choose music as a profession like you can choose to become a dentist. It chooses you.”–Gregor Piatigorsky
  • “Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.”–W. H. Auden
  • “Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.”–Anon.
  • “Oddly enough, I don’t think I even disagree with the substance of your posts (to the extent that anybody can even understand you).”–Ted Kerin
  • “First they came for the verbs and I said nothing, for verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns and I speech nothing, for I no verbs.”–nikittariber, in alt.fan.cecil-adams
  • “The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views.”– Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
  • “Some people just need to be taken aside and…and….left there”–Jason Drake
  • “Myth laughs at centuries and leaps across millennia. Myth punctures our provincial culture sacks and seeps into the world. Myth is patient, though not always kind. Myth is the soft womb out of which we came and to which we would return if we could. Myth is the language of God.”–Gordon Atkinson (Real Live Preacher)
  • “They need to love what they’re doing enough that they’re not thinking about how they want it to be all the time rather than being pleased with how it is.”–Cheryl Wheeler
  • “The world changed profoundly and unpredictably the day Tim Berners Lee got bitten by a radioactive spider.”–Rafe Culpin
  • “…to be entirely honest about it, you couldn’t have created my own personal dream girl any more completely if you had started from scratch with a vial of DNA and a well-played copy of Hounds of Love…If in fact I was not already massively married to another devastatingly intelligent totally hot long-haired brunette, well, I just don’t know what I’d do. Although I suspect it would involve groveling. And, eventually, restraining orders.”–John Scalzi
  • “If the cultural standard is damaging to one’s soul, then the cultural standard deserves to be rejected.”–Pat Kight
  • “Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.”– Alastair Gray
  • “Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview – nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.”– Stephen Jay Gould
  • “Tyler recalled telling his mother when he was four years old that he wanted to be a musician when he grew up. His mother told him he couldn’t do both.”–Associated Press story
  • “My own rule in life is that I refuse to worry about anything that’s safer than crossing the road.”–Zev Sero
  • “If you love a vowel, set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours forever. If not, save yourself some trouble and learn ancient Hebrew.”–Jeffrey Johnson
  • “How can you NOT get laid when you have a dancing midget at your disposal?”–Frumpy Jones
  • “Indeed, none of the accumulated data within the song even remotely leads to the conclusion that it’s a small world after all. At best, it concludes that it’s a world of indeterminate emotional states, rooted in a communal impulse.”–John Scalzi
  • “And all this time, I thought I was just confused.”–Aileen Carlstrom
  • “I’ll repeat the last couple of lines from my previous post, because apparently you were distracted by something bright and shiny off in the distance.”–Sam Hucheson
  • “Anyone who says that they can contemplate quantum mechanics without becoming dizzy has not understood the concept in the least.”–Niels Bohr
  • “I can see his point, too, but only because I’m scrutinising left-field with binoculars.”–David Matthewman
  • “Trying to understand polyamory based on someone using the word to try to get laid is kind of like trying to understand Christianity based on someone using that word to try to get elected.”–Pat Kight
  • “‘Scuse me if I still think it’s okay for people to give a damn.”–Mike Peterson
  • “This is some sort of usenet performance art, right?”–J. Jasper
  • “The profoundest act of worship is to try and understand.”–Cat Faber
  • “You can’t swat a wasp with the internet.”–Chris Greville
  • “We need more orgasms and less whining. More lubrication, less ignorance. More sensual body awareness, less stiff flabby awkward pain. More deep sticky joy, less cold bitter fear. Go ahead, try and refute.”–Mark Morford
  • “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a Barbara Walters special.”–Mike Peterson
  • “To be entirely honest about it, I lump people who believe that Republicans are fiscally responsible in with the people who believe in astrology and that the Earth was created in six days, in that whatever other positive qualities they might have, they have a fundamental defect in their ability to process reality.”–John Scalzi
  • “His books are the dark chocolate of urban fantasy – meant to be read slowly, each page and each word appreciated and rolled around in my mouth and my mind so I can savor the way it feels until I lose myself in his thoughts.”–Becky Schoenberg, on Charles de Lint
  • “That was like what, a hundred forty years ago? Why should I have to spend my whole life making sure everything I say about the Civil War is, you know, Politically Correct, so that it doesn’t offend any Confederate Sympathizers …I’m sorry, I mean the ‘differently historied.'”–Chris Clarke
  • “Teamwork spelled backwards is Krowmeat. The meaning of which escapes me.”–Hail
  • “USA Today adding a comics page would be like the National Enquirer adding a gossip column.”–Cindy Kandolf
  • “Children are natural lawyers. Thank God most of them grow out of it.”–Harold Feld
  • “Family Circus and Garfield are for children, but can also be appreciated by nitwits. This means they serve a wider demographic than Mallard Fillmore, which is not for children.”–Mike Peterson
  • “I think we’re here on the planet to create things, and be nice to one another. I sometimes like to think that the thing we tap into on being creative is a laser-like beam of light that we can touch.”–Chris Conway
  • “Lack of dead is good. I can’t entirely comment on New Jersey.”–Porpentine
  • “Cities have heartbeats; states have souls. Every neighborhood has a rhythm and a tempo all its own. They sigh and the traffic lights change in a staccato blast of greens and reds, changing the arterial flow of the cars; they dream and cats cry in the rafters of the tallest apartment buildings, their talls inscribing arpeggios in aged and ancient dust.”–Seanan McGuire
  • “So, there’s two teams of swaggering, egomanical, cocaine-crazed steroid mutants with delusions of godhood playing some silly game, and I’m supposed to care about it? Whatever for?”–Mike Van Pelt
  • “Have fun being Under Construction. After sex and ripe French cheeses, it’s one of the best things life has to offer.”–Molly Tomlinson
  • “My road atlas is so old that it still lists Ohio as part of the Virginia Territories”–Daniel Glasser
  • “The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice”–Heather Nicoll
  • “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye need to know on earth, besides TCP/IP”–Heathrow
  • “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander… except that ganders tend to be tougher and are a bit better stewed, and the gooses are better for roasting. so i guess that old wive’s tale isn’t a truism.”–Nicole
  • “Communities can form governments, but governments cannot form communities.”–RJ Johnson
  • “It’s been my experience that the way you meet people is simply to leave the house. With six billion people on the planet, it’s hard not to run into them.”–Tacit
  • “I don’t have a lifestyle, I have a life.”–Aahz
  • “I’m typically of the opinion that simulated violence creates as many violent people as simulated sex creates babies.”–John Scalzi
  • “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.”–Roger Ebert
  • “The plural of anecdote is not data.”–Donald M. Berkwick
  • “You want a substansive response? Make a substansive point.”–Heather Nicoll
  • “Well, that was a great big slice of wrong, with a big ol’ scoop of not right on top of it.”–chaoswolf
  • “Going by your posts, you’ve apparently got the social skills of a pet rock and the English skills of a Japanese engineer.”–Michael Rosen
  • “There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted.”–Miss Manners
  • “The most entertaining elevator rides are the ones with very young children who spend the ride staring intently at everyone, or make sudden announcements like, ‘I have pants on!'”–Debbie Ohi
  • “Criticizing a man for not holding political office is like criticizing a dog for not humping your leg. Both have the ability to do the deed but the superior ones choose not to.”–ronniecat
  • “Beware of confusing cultural hegemony with cultural evolution or evolution with progress.”–Norm
  • “Sometimes little gifts matter a lot; sometimes only a little or not at all. But sometimes is often enough, and kindness, like love, is infinitely transitive.”–Dave Rood
  • “You fail to understand that as a non-religious woman, I do not observe Sunday as the Lord’s day. To me, it’s just the last part of the weekend when TV is boring and I start wishing my family would go back to work because they are irritating the Hell out of me.”–crowjane
  • “I’m convinced that the cat was never domesticated; its appearance in the human home was an extraordinarily successful evolutionary adaptation.”–umar
  • “Never underestimate the pointless but compelling power of just wanting something.”–John Scalzi
  • “It’s hard to believe anyone can be that stupid and still be able to find their mouth with a spoon.”–Jo Walton
  • “Love is something you do, not something you feel.”–Gordon Atkinson (Real Live Preacher)
  • “We live in the transition between the future and the past. We are the moment that hope becomes memory.”–Gordon Atkinson (Real Live Preacher)
  • “Realism is only useful in drama up to a point, though, I think, and eventually you reach the pass where you find yourself filming the Empire State Building for eight hours.”–Warren Ellis
  • “I *am* this nice, what are you talking about?”–Aileen Carlstrom
  • “A good test of the success of a technology is whether after you have it you wonder how the hell you lived without it.”–John Scalzi
  • “Everything moves, and everything spins, however fast or slow. But some things cling to each other, hoping that they won’t have to move apart too soon. And then, because they can’t stop spinning… They dance.”–Paul Bristow
  • “I don’t like drama queens – but fortunately, she was only a drama countess. Well, maybe a drama duchess.”–Joe Woodhouse
  • “I’ve found many things go by more smoothly if I can tell myself, ‘I’m having an adventure!’ as opposed to ‘Oh, crap, it’s another learning experience.'”–RJ Johnson
  • “I’m not a huge fan of The Doors. I like their stuff okay, I guess. At their best they were a unique and passionate psychedelic rock band with a hard blues sound and occasionally brilliant lyrics. At their worst they sounded like a polka band trying to cover John Lee Hooker.”–Adam Felber
  • “If only those Ancient Greek storytellers had known about the astonishing creature that is the Usenet hydra : you cut off one head, and a stupider one grows back…”–MJ
  • “Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is to dance to it now.”–Ruben Alves
  • “Ah yes, ‘you’re just being politically correct’, the last refuge argument of the person who can’t be arsed figuring out why they’re coming across as a fuckwit.”–Heather Nicoll
  • “Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.”–Oliver Wendell Holmes
  • “I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”–Theodor Seuss Geisel
  • “I would rather live in a world where life is surrounded by mystery, than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.”–Harry Emerson Fosdick
  • “You will love some people deeply. Others will receive lesser kinds of love. Some will get a handshake and a kind word. Their journeys are their own, and they may have to get what they need from someone else. Love the ones you can. Touch the ones you can reach. Let the others go.”–Gordon Atkinson (Real Live Preacher)
  • “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”–George Bernard Shaw
  • “When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.”–Neil Gaiman
  • “I didn’t so much gafiate as move to Asia.”–Marian Rosenberg, 12/2003
  • “Gadgets are fun. Computers are useful. Books are essential.”–Dan Gillmor
  • “I am still hallucinating geese, but that is a conscious choice.”–Naomi Rivkis
  • “My mind may be warped but at least it’s not boring.”–Naomi Rivkis
  • “I’d like you to make me a mocha-caramel-hazelnut frappe, with raspberry syrup, whipped cream, and a pinch of nutmeg. Then I’d like you to shove it up your ass and get me a cup of coffee.”–Lore Brand Comics
  • “One nuclear weasel can ruin your whole day.”–Umar
  • “I remember the first time I read The Lord of the Rings, in high school sometime. I read the last few pages, in which the hobbit Frodo sails in his old age for the lands of the West, where heroes go, the awful price of carrying the ring and breaking the back of darkness paid at last. I went out onto the patio of my parent’s house, and I stood for a long time, looking at the sunset. No story, no history, no instructive biography or sermon had ever made me feel the way I felt then: that humanity had an infinite capacity for nobility, for goodness, for strength used with wisdom and informed by mercy, and that I was part of that.”–Emma Bull, “Why I Write Fantasy” (1990)
  • “Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.”–Mark Abley, journalist (1955- )
  • “I try to be cynical, but it’s so hard to keep up.”–Lily Tomlin
  • “Love hurts. Not loving kills.”–Mike Whitaker
  • “One big problem with my life, my plans, my relationships, etc., is that they all have me in them. I think it’d all go much easier if they didn’t.”–Paul Estin
  • “I’ve often said the answer to the question, “What would Jesus do?” is, “Jesus would observe shabbat, keep kosher, and wonder why the goyim were making such a fuss over him.”–Hal O’Brien
  • “To have a lot of dolls made of two characters that I have played or to find little representations of myself falling out of a cornflakes box or on a Burger King mug, these are not necessarily desirable things, but when they happen you just sort of hug yourself with delight”–Ian McKellen
  • “You have not lived until you’ve woken up with a large, terrified cat hanging off your nose by her teeth, having given you a friendly nip while you were sleeping and having reacted to you rolling over in your sleep by clamping down and getting dragged along for the ride. Well, you -have- lived, but it apparently did not involve having cats dangling off your face.”–James Nicoll
  • “And when we come to think of it, goodness is uneventful. It does not flash, it grows. It is deep, quiet, and very simple. It passes not with oratory, it is commonly foreign to riches, nor does it often sit in the places of the mighty; but may be felt in the touch of a friendly hand or the look of a kindly eye.”–David Grayson
  • “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”– Albert Einstein
  • “Sometimes I envy the cait sidhe. They combine loyalty, arrogances and madness in a strangely beautiful, utterly alien society. No one understands cats — not even the cats themselves — and there’s freedom in that. Not the sort of freedom you find anywhere else, but freedom all the same. All cats are Kings in their hearts, and as long as they know that, they can obey the orders of their standing King in perfect peace.”–Seanan McGuire
  • “Hell, I was driving a minivan when I was in my 20’s. Haven’t you ever wanted to drive across country without having to stay in hotels? Or get out of the ocean in late fall and have a nice warm place to change out of your wetsuit? A way to cart abandoned video games the diner you’re having lunch at wants to get rid of right now? In short, have you no passion? Have you no lust for life? In short, haven’t you ever wanted a rolling, V6 place in which you could fuck?”–infinitehotel, on livejournal
  • “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”–Bill Cosby
  • “We all have stories – a history that sews one piece of itself to another until you get the reason we’re who we are now.”–Charles DeLint
  • “Accidental Heroes are on my “good guy” list this week because it appears as if hard rock has recently once again slid further into the Pit of Whiny Miserable Bastardness, in which 23-year-old boys drone on about how friggin’ horrible life is. Back in my day, Whiny Miserable Bastardness was confined to Pink Floyd and the Goth Ghetto, and that’s the way we all liked it.”–John Scalzi
  • “In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.”–Edward P. Tryon
  • “If you think that the world around you is a simple mechanism handwaved into existence, then you condemn your Creator as being without imagination. Isn’t it more awe-inspiring and wondrous to imagine that the Universe began with a huge outrush of energies, exploding outward at unimaginable speeds, space and time coming in being, turning non-existence into existence as it expanded, the laws of physics that would continue to govern all time evermore crystalizing with each passing moment… and all beginning with the words, ‘Let there be light’?”–Terence Chua
  • “Forget retired football coaches, these rappers need to get sponsored by the new impotence drugs. They are so concerned about the status of their phallus, they constantly check to make sure it doesn’t fall off while they’re on stage.”–Brian Richardson
  • “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”–James Joyce
  • ” Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”–Agnes de Mille
  • “On the surface, it looks like a midlife crisis. To me, it’s just another day on the freeway.”–Brenda Davarin
  • “My love runs by like a day in June,
    And he makes no friends of sorrows.
    He’ll tread his galloping rigadoon
    In the pathway or the morrows.
    He’ll live his days where the sunbeams start
    Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
    My own dear love, he is all my heart —
    And I wish somebody’d shoot him.”
    — Dorothy Parker
  • “It’s easier to be a genius when nobody’s looking.”–Art Speigelman
  • “Forget the Clue by Four. I need a Cluewitzer.”–Randy Milholland
  • “I may not practice what I preach, but God forbid that I preach what I practice.”–G.K. Chesterton
  • “The struggle is good. Being unsure of what God is calling you to is good. Wrestling with angels and demons in the wilderness is good. Not knowing is good. Being afraid is good. Being real and human and wanting truth so bad that you can taste it is good.”–Gordon Atkinson (Real Live Preacher)
  • “Stories, when left on their own, like to breed. This is why when you are packing to move you can take all of your books off of your bookshelf and put them into a box just so, but upon unpacking them they don’t fit on the bookshelves anymore. They breed in dark places, which is why books must always remain in the open.”–aeire
  • “I believe God put that itchy spot on our backs just exactly where we can’t reach it in order to encourage us be nice to each other.”–Teresa Nielsen Hayden
  • “Sometimes I want to go up to the people who insist that feminism and progressive values are Ruining Science Fiction and remind them that their genre exists because a teenaged girl was stuck at a house party and decided that inventing science fiction sounded more appealing than yet another tiresome threesome with Lord Byron.”–nonasuch, on Tumblr
  • “Perfection. Excellence. What a passionate lover. But once having tasted the lips of excellence, once having given oneself to its perfection, how dreary and burdensome and filled with anomie are the remainder of one’s waking hours trapped in the shackled lock-step of the merely ordinary, the barely acceptable, the just okay and a not a stroke better…Excellence is its own master, owes no allegiance, bows its head to no regimen. It exists pure and whole like the silver face of the moon. Untouchable, unreachable, exquisite. But frustrating because it reminds us how much mediocrity we put with, just to get through the week.”–Harlan Ellison
  • “Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.”–H.L. Mencken
  • “The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous. Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.”–Aldous Huxley
  • “Really, ladies, men’s hormones are remarkably malleable. If the entire female population of America decided to wear nothing but potato sacks, you’d be amazed (and possibly dismayed) at how fast and how many men would start to get turned on by burlap.”–Freezer
  • “But, as they say, heroism is nothing but reckless stupidity with a positive outcome.”–Volker Bach
  • “I’m even more disturbed now. Yay.”–Josh Brandt
  • “I’m a patriot. I love my decadent, cosmopolitan, self-indulgent, racially mixed, godless, intellectually dilettante, drug-abusing, promiscuous, queer-loving country. And its flag is the Stars and Stripes.”–Patrick Nielsen Hayden
  • “If they say no, well, dating is like defusing bombs. You can’t expect it to work every time. Just collect the bits and move on.”–James Nicoll
  • “The lessons of history teach us — if the lessons of history teach us anything — that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.”–Robert A. Heinlein
  • “The thing I like about history is that it’s over and I know what happened. I hate feeling like part of an avalanche.”–Jo Walton
  • “This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”–Woody Guthrie
  • “No one ever says, ‘I can’t read that ASCII E-mail you sent me.'”– Matthew Keller
  • “But despite several million years of thinking virtually nonstop about sex, guys have made very little progress toward answering such basic questions about human sexuality as: How can you obtain more of it? How much talking is required? What is the role of jewelry? How important is the size of a guy’s, um, car?”–Dave Barry
  • “Men would admire a woman’s brain more if it bounced gently as she walked.”–Chris Mack
  • “I’ve always been perplexed at the way we fall in love with people and then set about trying to change them. It shouldn’t be surprising that, if we succeed, they are no longer the people we fell in love with.”–Pat Kight
  • “The best “self-defense means” when you are surrounded by a hundred million people of some other culture is to avoid dangerous places and figure out some way to get along with the folks around you.”–Neal Stephenson
  • “Don’t give me solutions. It’s my job to find solutions. Give me the problem, and I’ll fix it.”–Erik Olsen
  • “What do you mean, ‘*If* a woodchuck could chuck wood’? What’s the point of calling it a woodchuck if it can’t??–David Gunter
  • “My early choice in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.”–Harry S. Truman
  • “Faith is not trying to believe something regardless of the evidence; faith is daring something regardless of the consequences.”– Sherwood Eddy
  • “Certain readers, researchers, absorbers of the text, consumers, if you will, of the written word, may experience some minor discomfiture if the mode of discourse tends towards the loquacious — particularly when the point is needlessly, redundantly or pointlessly repeated or recapitulated for no discernable reason, or indeed if the writer endeavours to utilise polysylabic constructions, replete with subordinate clauses, redolent of the worse parodies of the more verbose styles, in the belief that this somehow lends extra weight or credence to the thesis being promulgated in the work being constructed.Terse is better.”–Douglas Spencer
  • “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”–Hunter S. Thompson
  • “Frankly, I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.”–Hunter S. Thompson
  • “But I’m crap at science, and I’ve never tried to hide it. I like science for the art it makes, and I still can’t programme the VCR.”–Warren Ellis
  • “Surely, if you’re upset that someone called you an idiot, the wisest course of action would be not to write an odd screed that will itself convince many people who haven’t heard of you before reading it that this is in fact the case.”–Neil Gaiman
  • “We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.”–John Foster Hall
  • “This is just speculation on my part, but I’m damn good at speculation, and speculation passes for fact on Usenet.”–Dick Sidbury
  • “Just because people find you annoying, that doesn’t mean you’re a genius ahead of your time.”–Serene Vannoy
  • “I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”–Steeler’s Wheel
  • “Nature abhors a vacuum, which explains why drama appears where communication is lacking.”– Alan Lutton
  • “You can’t put a price on memories like those. However, I did, and they weren’t worth it.”–Brooke McEldowney
  • “I just don’t write as much as I used to, but I like what I write a lot better. I’m much less inclined to mine my own displeasure as songwriter fodder. That’s partly because I’m really quite happy these days, and partly because I’m 53. In your 20s, you think of your own mood swings and vague unhappiness as being worthy of discussion; in your 50s, you don’t. Things that would have made me sit down and write sad little minor-key songs now make me think, ‘Oh, get over yourself; you’re fine, shut up.'”–Cheryl Wheeler
  • “Cultivate and care for those select few around you well, my friends; when you need them, you need them badly.”–ronniecat
  • “The rhetoric has become so super-heated that, sadly, I find myself having fewer and fewer political discussions these days. And while I miss the spirited give-and-take, when Supreme Court Justices become worse than Hitler and when those who vote a certain way do so because they’re idiots, it’s time to talk about the weather.”–Pat Sajak
  • “The sooner you stop living in your stupid little fantasy world and accept that you’re not normal, the sooner it’ll stop bothering you.”–Erin Lindsey
  • “You Mikes and Bobs and Carols and Susans don’t appreciate how much the popularity of your names shielded you from reflexively assuming you were being blamed for the misbehavior of random four-year-olds.”–Evan Kirshenbaum
  • “It’s a dangerous life, and none of us gets out of it alive. I weigh my fears against my joys, and try to make sure the latter tip the balance.”–Pat Kight
  • “How do you predict the future? That’s easy. How do you create the future? That’s hard.”–Robert X. Cringely
  • “To my hearing, ‘lifestyle’ is off-the-peg rather than bespoke. It means you’re conforming to some cliche idea of what to do, when to do it, who to do it with (or to). I am uniquely me- no-one, anywhere, has quite the same combination of likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, habits (good and bad), tropes and phobias. No-one. ‘Lifestyle’ is too… packaged a concept. It’s MSLife[tm] rather than life.”–Marc, in alt.polyamory
  • “Given the asymmetry between what persuades you you’re wrong, and what persuades you you’re right, you’re in danger of ending up believing a lot of nonsense.”–Chris Malcolm
  • “We live in a world where joy is possible, love is possible, happiness is possible; where all things are possible, if we’re willing to take the time, take a chance, take a breath and step off the edge of everything that is for the sake of everything that might be.”–Seanan McGuire
  • “It’s a sad day when Bil Keane’s cultural references are too hip for me to understand.”Peter B. Steiger
  • “I have realized what I need to do in order to make my life perfect. I need to find a way to match the times when I have nothing to do with the times when I have no desire to do anything.”–Becky Schoenberg
  • “‘Kindness’ covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”–Roger Ebert
  • “You only have yourself to blame for blaming yourself for everything.”–Peter Alway
  • “The best way for us old farts to understand emo as a musical style right now is to imagine the most wimpy-introspective-ennui-filled singer-songwriter tunes from the early ’70s mated to a just-slightly-deburred cathartic-punk and early new-wave musical approach. Passive-aggressive personality in musical form.”–JGM, in rec.arts.comics.strips
  • “Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you, and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on Earth, and you should save it for someone you love.”–Butch Hancock
  • “The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not a failed attempt at being you. They are unique manifestations of the human spirit.”–Wade Davis
  • “I’m one of those singer/songwriter guys who always wanted to be a musician; I enjoy hanging out with musicians and listening to them. I enjoy standing onstage with really talented players and seeing what they bring to my songs.”–Lyle Lovett
  • “A few weeks ago Wednesday was Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address. It was an interesting juxtaposition: one involved a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for clues about the days to come, and the other involved a groundhog.”–David
  • “Identity can be so gelatinous sometimes.”–Neil Gaiman
  • “It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it”–Joseph Joubert
  • “I’ve known amateur “club” rugby players who would happily break all the limbs of equivalent-level football players, then kill them and eat their flesh. Not out of meanness, but as part of the fun of sports.”–Ted Kerin
  • “Most of the rest of constitutional law is a matter of name-calling. Conservatives denounce liberals for judicial activism on abortion, gay rights, and church-state separation, while liberals denounce conservatives for judicial activism on affirmative action, states’ rights, and election law. Your job as an aspiring constitutional lawyer is to figure out where you stand on these issues, and then accuse those who disagree with you of being either judicial activists or hypocrites.”–Michael C. Dorf
  • “Being a middle-aged white woman is kind of like having civil rights, but not really an adequate substitute.”–Jo Walton
  • “Apparently, heterosexual monogamy is so unattractive, unappealing, and unpleasant that only the absence of an alternative makes it viable at all.”–Alan Bostick
  • “But life is a gift. It’s not owed; it’s given. Talents are gifts. Strength and wit and even beauty are gifts, with no price tag. And I wonder how it would be if ours were a culture of giving, rather than owing: if we were brought up to believe that we are all immensely rich in ourselves, and that the way to make the best of our riches is to give them to the world, as the world gives to us. Give our time and our energy to help others, as we are given the means to live. Give of our talent to make the world even more beautiful, as others make it more beautiful for us. Give our lives, not because we owe them, but because we have them.”–Zanda Myrande
  • “Quando omni flunkus moritati. (If all else fails, play dead.)”–Motto of the Possom Lodge
  • “We used to make jokes about the president’s brother — Billy Carter, Roger Clinton, and, yes, Teddy Kennedy. But somehow, this time around, we elected the useless sonuvabitch while the smart one is down running Florida.”–Mike Peterson
  • “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
  • “I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact that I knew I was in the gutter. I kind of miss that, even these days, whenever people come up and inform me, oh, you do graphic novels. No. I wrote comic books, for heaven’s sake. They’re creepy and I was down in the gutter and you despised me. ‘No, no, we love you! We want to give you awards! You write graphic novels!’ We like it here in the gutter!”–Neil Gaiman
  • “You’d make an excellent editor — a knowledge of rules and blindness to the variety of expression, plus the sense that, even when you aren’t at your best, your work is still better than someone else’s, even when that someone else has a demonstrable track record of creative genius.”–Mike Peterson
  • “In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true, and try to imagine what it could be true of.”–George Miller
  • “Calm in quietude is not real calm; when you can be calm in the midst of activity, this is the true state of nature. Happiness in comfort is not real happiness; when you can be happy in the midst of hardship, then you see the true potential of the mind. “–Huanchu Daoren
  • “If televison’s a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won’t shut up.”–Dorothy Gambrell
  • “BELIEVING that there is beauty and wonder in all things, I pledge to find that beauty and allow that wonder; to dance in rainstorms, to search for pennies in gutters; to sing happy little songs about pumpkin cake with chocolate chips, to love too much, to trust too deeply, to give too freely, and to laugh too loudly. I will pet cats and velociraptor roar at small children. I will write poetry. I will sing in public places, sometimes at the top of my lungs, often without a backing band. I will travel as often as I can, whether it be down the street or across the world. I will live my life, and I will encourage others to do the same, and to do it with me.”–Seanan McGuire
  • “Moreover, to my mind, a book is to a PDF file as sex to pornography. The book is something to hold, not just something to look at. I cannot see an excerpt from an attractive book on some backlit computer projection, without longing for the real thing.”–David Warren
  • “If you don’t spend three months of the year buried under two feet of white stuff that NEVER melts, it ain’t winter. It’s just a permanent November with delusions of grandeur.”–Naomi Rivkis
  • “Seriously, things have gotten so bad out there that mozilla.com isn’t just rational self-defense anymore; it’s a moral imperative.–J.D. Baldwin
  • “That’s not even a strawman anymore, the bull’s eaten it a day or so ago.”–John Palmer
  • “Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.”–Albert Camus
  • “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.”–Albert Camus
  • “Because a thing is difficult for you, do not therefore suppose it to be beyond mortal power. On the contrary, if anything is possible and proper for man to do, assume that it must fall within your own capacity.”–Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
  • “Coming up with ideas is not something I ever really have trouble with. Coming up with good ideas, well, that’s something else.”–Warren Ellis
  • “To say that there is a war against Christianity in the United States is not only wrong, it’s insulting. It’s insulting to people who fight every day to stay alive and maintain their faith, and it’s an insult to those who have died for their beliefs. “Oh no, some people have said they don’t like Christianity in a public forum?” How about “Oh no, Christian believers were tortured and executed in China last week?”Honestly, people. The next time you’re at church, sit and listen. Hear that? That silence? It’s the sound of people not coming to decapitate you because of what you believe.–Carmen Machado
  • “If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.”–John Cage
  • “The Baptists fear sex because it could lead to dancing. They fear dancing because it could lead to music. They fear music, because it can lead you to the voice of God.”–Sam Hucheson
  • “Something similar happens as we pass a certain threshold in our own life cycle, beyond which one grows increasingly certain that the days behind outnumber the days ahead. We become aware that we, too, are short-lived creatures. It begins to matter exquisitely how we treat each other and how we bestow our attention. Yes, it has always mattered that much. And yes, it’s too easy to be distracted by the life of usual things, and not to notice that what truly matters still matters. That is why forgiveness matters.”–Barry Childs-Helton
  • “You sometimes hear stories of the agony of the original scriptwriter watching the process unfold, but you still have to wonder, in some cases, how even the first draft came about: How anyone could, for instance, look at The Hunchback, even the film adaptations, never mind the novel, and think, ‘With a couple of singing gargoyles, this would really be a cute story for kids!'”–Mike Peterson
  • “Unlike Voltaire, I only defend to the death your free speech up to the point where you walk up to and insult the biggest, meanest drunk in the place. At that point, my support becomes highly theoretical and I’ll hold your glasses, boy-o.”–Mike Peterson
  • “For every bozo with a lever, usenet provides a place to stand.”–Ryk
  • “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”–Mark Twain
  • “I have found problems that can’t be solved in the way that I’d like to solve them. This doesn’t mean that a solution doesn’t exist. I may even get to like the alternate solution. It’s all a matter of perspective.The glass is neither half full, nor half empty. It does, however, contain water.If you’re thirsty, drink it.–Bill Roper
  • “Now will saying “yes” get you in trouble at times? Will saying “yes” lead you to doing some foolish things? Yes it will. But don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying “yes” begins things. Saying “yes” is how things grow. Saying “yes” leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say “yes.””–Stephen Colbert
  • “At this point, while I wish there were a greater balance between left-wing blatherers and right-wing blatherers, just to kind of level the playing field, I’d be a lot happier if they’d all get on a boat and head for the edge of the earth. To try to draw distinctions between [Bill] O’Reilly and [Michael] Moore is pointless.”–Mike Peterson
  • “I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn’t poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy. I was deprived. (Oh not deprived but rather underprivileged) Then they told me that underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don’t have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary.”–Jules Feiffer
  • “If by 2506 there’s not an enormous lunar city named Armstrongville, filled with elementary school children who re-enact “One Small Step” every July 20 wearing construction paper helmets and cardboard-box life support packs, I will be very disappointed.Well, I’ll be dead. But my scattered atoms will be individually disappointed.”–Brian Fies
  • “There is no source of fiction research quite like hanging out in a naturist sauna with an undertaker.” –Charlie Stross
  • “Al Capone once said you get more with a kind word and a gun than you do with a kind word alone. That’s true (sometimes). But it also turns out to be true that you get more with a kind word and a gun than you do with a gun alone.”–Harold Feld
  • “The kitten has a luxurious, Bohemian, unpuritanical nature. It eats six meals a day, plays furiously with a toy mouse and a piece of rope, and suddenly falls into a deep sleep whenever the fit takes it. It never feels the necessity to do anything to justify its existence; it does not want to be a Good Citizen; it has never heard of Service. It knows that it is beautiful and delightful, and it considers that a sufficient contribution to the general good. And in return for its beauty and charm it expects fish, meat, and vegetables, a comfortable bed, a chair by the grate fire, and endless petting.”
    –Robertson Davies, “The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks”
  • “I can’t decide if I feel more like four ten-year-olds or ten four-year-olds.”–Laurie Anderson , on turning 40
  • “I’m quite happy to be “deprived” of the company of people who are interested in me providing them things I don’t care to offer. This includes door-to-door salesmen, proselytising godbotherers, and people whose primary interest is that I fuck them.”–Heather Nicoll
  • “To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.”– Robertson Davies
  • “What if a meteorite shoots radiation down on the graveyard, so that all the corpses get to arise and walk the earth as zombies, to devour the flesh of the living? See, if I was cremated, I would miss out on all of that.”–Ted Kerin
  • “All you “experts” can continue to find reasons why it isn’t perfect while you sit there and curse the darkness. I have lit my candle.”–Fritz Schneider
  • “‘Sex is not the answer to every existential dilemma, Sirius.’ ‘I don’t see why not. It’s a good distraction, and most existential dilemmas are caused by not having enough to do.'”–sam_storyteller, in his story Lacoon’s Children: Year Two
  • “Nothing like assembling a treadmill to remind you exactly **why** you need a bleepin’ treadmill.”–Gary Ehrlich
  • “Logic is great for linear problem solving. But there’s a whole lot about life that isn’t linear, much less a problem.”–Pat Kight
  • “You can wait around for life to happen, but it already has.”–Guy Gilchrist
  • “Wow. My stomach hurts, and I’m a little embarrassed right now, actually. Lesson learned: the brown-liquor-fueled dark place in my soul should not come with an internet connection.”–Patrick Daniels
  • “Sex is a wonderful connection, but there are lots of ways to connect to people. Sometimes sex gets in the way of making connections with others; you have this big, loud method of communicating, and you miss the opportunity to whisper poetry instead.”–John Palmer
  • “The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it’s just sort of a tired feeling.”-Paula Poundstone
  • “Olive Garden is very nice if your main complaint about airline food is that the portions are too small and there isn’t enough leg room.”–Mike Peterson
  • “We aren’t given all the pieces of our own jigsaw, and some of the ones we have only fit wrong way up.”–Zanda Myrande
  • “Your question only makes any sense at all if you completely ignore the point I was making. You are welcome, of course, to continue ignoring me, but it would probably be more efficient use of your time to do so with less typing.”–Heather Nicoll
  • “I don’t really look at myself as the kind of person who craves attention, but I’ve never been to therapy so there’s probably a lot of stuff about myself that I don’t know.”–Al Yankovic
  • “I’d agree someone is showing their ignorance and obtuseness here. I suspect we might differ on who it is.”–John Scalzi
  • “As for language, almost everything goes now. That is not to say that verbal taboos have disappeared, but merely that they have shifted somewhat. In my youth, for example, there were certain words you couldn’t say in front of a girl; now you can say them, but you can’t say ‘girl’.”–Tom Lehrer
  • “I don’t set out to push boundries. That would be a bit silly. But I have a pretty low boredom tolerance.”–Bjork Gudmundsdottir
  • “If we don’t change our direction, we’re going to wind up where we’re headed.”–Native American proverb
  • “For the record: I did not experiment with drugs in the 1960s. Jonas Salk experimented with drugs in the 1960s. We were just getting fucked up.”–Mike Peterson
  • “It all looks inevitable only in retrospect.”–Lois McMaster Bujold
  • “The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.”–Lois McMaster Bujold
  • “Tempura is so awesome, because it’s a little taste of what the world would be like if vegetables were donuts.”–Marian Call
  • “What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means, and what life is for.”–George Mallory
  • “Reviews of graphics quality seem a bit pointless, imo – I’ve got a painting in my living room that looks great, but the gameplay sucks. “–Brent Stroh
  • “I tend to come down on the side of autonomy. Once people are grown up, I believe they have the right to go to hell in the handbasket of their choosing.”–Pat Kight
  • “Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of habit.”–Somerset Maugham
  • It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved.”–Somerset Maugham
  • There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”–Somerset Maugham
  • “Peter, Paul and Mommy, on the other hand, was our sole “Children’s” CD – and was driving me nuts. Can even the Decemberists match the soul-sucking depression of “Puff The Magic Dragon”? The beloved children’s classic taught an entire generation of kids not only that magic exists, but that it dies, sadly and alone. Life – in the Land of Honalee, anyway – is ultimately solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Thomas Hobbes had nothing on Little Jackie Paper, trust me.”–John Kovalic
  • “Resentment is allowing someone to live rent-free in a room in your head,”–Unknown, quoted by Roger Ebert
  • “If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain.”–Adlai Stevenson Jr.
  • “It is a great nuisance that knowledge can be acquired only by hard work.”–Somerset Maugham
  • “The future’s already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.”–William Gibson
  • “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”–Marianne Williamson
  • “I have a rule of thumb. It’s not an absolute rule, but it is a rule of thumb: nobody wants to keep a secret from me for my benefit.”–J. Brad Hicks
  • “The anti-regulation business ethos is based on the charmingly naive notion that people will not do unspeakable things for money.”–Dana Carpender
  • “Some people think I enjoy debate. I don’t. I wish everyone agreed with me; it would save a lot of time.”–Bill Maher
  • “English steals useful words, but often discards the packaging.”–Marc, in alt.polyamory
  • “Always do. Always dare. Inaction has a much higher price than error.”–Alexander Arce
  • “If you just write down what they say, that’s called publicizing. Writing down what they actually do, what they are proposing in terms of policy, that is reporting. And it is the distance between what they say and what they’re actually doing, that is the news.”–Rachel Maddow
  • “The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.”–Anatole France
  • “I got maybe two-thirds of the way through his first volume [which I had heard praised for years & years while it was out of print; it’s very disappointing] and uttered the Eight Deadly Words ™ and dropped the book over the side of the bed. (only really bad ones get thrown against the wall.)The Eight Deadly Words ™:
  • “I don’t care what happens to these people!”–Dorothy J. Heydt
  • “I waste amounts of time that would be hard to justify even if I was immortal.”–Kevin Seccia
  • “Tomorrow the role of me will be played by someone more interested and better qualified.”–Shauna Renee
  • “I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.”–Susan Sontag
  • “There is a big difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy. Of course the Democrats are disappointing. That’s what makes them Democrats. If they were any more frustrating they’d be your relatives. But in this country they are all that stands between you and darkest night. You know why their symbol is the letter ‘D’? Because it’s a grade that means good enough, but just barely. You know why the Republican symbol is ‘R’? Because it’s the noise a pirate makes when he robs you and feeds you to a shark.”–Bill Maher
  • “Behind every great man, there’s a great woman…because we live on a sphere and everyone is constantly behind everyone.”–Guy Endore-Kaiser
  • “To achieve great things, 2 things are needed; a plan, & not quite enough time.”–Leonard Bernstein
  • “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.”–Ambrose Redmoon
  • “If your main concern is to show your heart is in the right place, your heart is not in the right place.”–David Schmidtz
  • “In some countries Women’s Day is a national holiday and men give women flowers. In America Women’s Day falls on another holiday, Mardi Gras, where men give women beads in the respectful and post-feminist desire to see their naked boobies.”–Craig Ferguson
  • “”If the experience of the last ten years has taught us anything, it should be this: We can bomb our enemies into the Stone Age, but we cannot bomb them into the 21st century,”–Kevin D Williamson, National Review
  • “Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold on the dark slope of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city.”–John Updike
  • “What you risk reveals what you value.”–Jeanette Winterson
  • “I miss the snow. Yes, I know the United States gets snow, but to my Canadian eye, American snow is like American health care: sporadic, unreliable and distributed unevenly among the population.”–Tim Long
  • “People who are sensible about love are incapable of it.”–Douglas Yates
  • “When I was a child, I thought as a child. Now I am an adult, I can afford the cool stuff. And I’m pretty passionate about it.”–Tanya Huff
  • “If I am to be fallen into love, I will. And if as a result I will appear to be stupid, disillusioned, and of poor judgment, I will. And I would be damned if I cared what other people think. For I would rather be thought of as all of these things, than not love. If in loving, I become the naked woman on the horse, I will ride that horse with my head held high. This is my spirit. I am unbreakable.”–C. JoyBell C
  • “In baseball analysis, they say that health is a skill; in presidential politics, insane, all-encompassing ambition is a skill.”–Jonathan Bernstein
  • “It’s a vital lesson that depressives in particular learn over and over in life: the intensity of the emotions you feel does not necessarily affect the real world.”–Ferrett Steinmetz
  • If all the time I’ve spent in nonprofit strategy breakout sessions explaining what a podcast is was added up I would kill myself a lot.”–Glen Weldon
  • “Everyone is my teacher. Some I seek. Some I subconsciously attract. Often I learn simply by observing others. Some may be completely unaware that I’m learning from them, yet I bow deeply in gratitude.”–Eric Allen
  • “There is no need to sharpen my pencils anymore.  My pencils are sharp enough. Even the dull ones will make a mark.” –Ze Frank
  • “Whenever you ask “What would Jesus do?” remember that kicking over the tables of money-lenders and flogging them with a whip is one of the available choices…”–Ken Burnside
  • “It’d be just the miraculous, crazy random fact that there’s something rather than nothing that never ceases to amaze me. But I don’t attribute it to any kind of supernatural being. I just look at the fact that there’s something rather than nothing. I can look out my window and see the tops of a bunch of trees, a motorcycle going by, a guy crossing the street talking on the phone. How is any of it possible? That sense of wonder is all the religion I need anymore.”–Richard Shindell, on his understanding of God
  • “Several other people have spoken about tradition just now. I come out of an old tradition, like many old traditions that most of you in this room are familiar with, that looks at this kind of relationship between three people and says, ‘No, you should not. No, you may not. No, you cannot.’ I think it is time for a new tradition: one that says, ‘If you do no harm, yes, you may. If you love each other, yes, you can. If you are willing to commit to supporting and building up one another for a lifetime, yes, you should.'”–W. Randy Hoffman
  • “To me it seems to be important to believe people to be good even if they tend to be bad, because your own joy and happiness in life is increased that way, and the pleasures of the belief outweigh the occasional disappointments. To be a cynic about people works just the other way around and makes you incapable about enjoying the good things.”–Isaac Asimov
  • “History is very complicated, and we are not its crescendo.”–Patrick Nielsen Hayden
  • “It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.”–Hugh Laurie
  • “I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damn things have learned to swim”–Frida Kahlo
  • “PT Barnum noted a century ago there is a sucker born every minute. The Internet allows you to aggregate them for fun and profit.”–Harold Feld
  • “When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”–C.S. Lewis
  • “I suppose it’s because I approach roleplaying less like escapism and more like playing a part in a play or movie. Actors often prefer to play villains and comic relief characters, even if it’s the hero who winds up looking good and getting the girl. I don’t need to fantasize about being stronger or smarter or more powerful. I just want to fantasize about being interesting.”–Tailsteak, “Leftover Soup” #194 (webcomic)
  • “We all should live our lives so that people feel like we were taken too soon at 95-years old.”–Marshall Ramsey
  • “A civilized society compensates for the human propensity to screw up. That’s why we have single-payer firefighters and police officers. That’s why we require seat belts. When someone who has been speeding gets in a car accident, the 911 operator doesn’t sneer: “You were irresponsible, so figure out your own way to the hospital” — and hang up. To err is human, but so is to forgive. Living in a community means being interconnected in myriad ways — including by empathy. To feel undiminished by the deaths of those around us isn’t heroic Ayn Rand individualism. It’s sociopathic. Compassion isn’t a sign of weakness, but of civilization.”
    –Nicholas D. Kristof