It is certain that the most ignorant and stupid peasents, nay infants, nay
even brute beasts, improve by experience.
        -- David Hume

I wanna go home
Take off this uniform and leave the show.
But I'm waiting in this cell because I have to know,
Have I been guilty all this time?
        -- Pink Floyd

Proud swagger out of the school yard
Waiting for the world's applause
Rebel without a conscience
Martyr without a cause
Static on your frequency
Electrical storm in your veins
Raging at unreachable glory
Straining at invisible chains
        -- Rush, "The Pass"

You don't leave your fly open in a pressure suit.
        -- Larry Niven, "The Hole Man"

More over, nature teaches me that many bodies exist around mine, of which
some are to be avoided.
        -- Descartes

Age is not decisive; what is decisive is the trained relentlessness in
viewing the realities of life, and the ability to face such realities and
to measure up to them inwardly.
        -- Max Weber

And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with
that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all
hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain
even that which is possible today.
        --Max Weber

Surely, politics is made with the head, but it certainly is not made with
the head alone.
        --Max Weber

People who quote themselves worry me!  
        --Kevin P. McLoughlin

Life is Final Jeopardy.  
        --H. Carol Bernstein esq.               
                
Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night: God said,  "Let Newton be! and
all was light."
        -- Alexander Pope

It did not last, the devil a howling, "Ho, let Einstein be!, restored the
status-quo."
        -- J.C.Squire

But that was not all . The electron piped-in, "Let Schroedinger be and not
be!, after all there is only a probability... "
        -- Milind Sharma

All of western philosophy consists in a series of footnotes to Plato. 
        -- A.N. Whitehead

Ultimate consistency lies in being consistently inconsistent. 
        -- M. Sharma

All of science is PHYSICS or stamp- collecting.  
        -- E. Rutherford

I do not invent Hypotheses.  
        -- Isaac Newton

Newton, forgive me...  
        -- Albert Einstein

Whereof we cannot speak thereof we must be silent.   
        -- L. Wittgenstein

Why did no one teach me the constellations when I was a child.   
        -- Thomas Carlyle

The stuff of the world is mind stuff.  
        -- Arthur Eddington

Astronomy compels the soul to look upward and lead us from this world to
another.  
        -- Plato

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.   
        -- Sir James Jeans

We are indeed a blind race, and the next generation, blind to its own
blindness, will be amazed at ours.
        -- L.L. White

....but I do not know where the world ends.   
        -- Buddha

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite
of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.   
        -- Neils Bohr

No man when conscious attains to true or inspired intuition, but rather
when the power of intellect is fettered in sleep or by disease or dementia.
  
        -- Phaedrus

Science is far more exciting than fiction, far more subtle and has the
additional virtue of being true.   
        -- Carl Sagan

Happens all the time; you sit on a pole, and barns fly by.  
        -- Peter Colling, Physics 6

Suppose you were a member of Congress, and suppose you were a criminal--
but I repeat myself.
        -- Twain

Eros makes life worth living ( and the purest eros must be mathematical).   
        -- Anon.

The physicist need not defer to anybody save the mathematician.   
        -- The Arrogant Mathematician

Any theorem that mathematicians can prove must of necessity  (and mathematical
conceit) be trivial.  
        -- The Humble Physicist

God does not throw dice.  
        -- Albert Einstein

Nor is it our business to prescribe to God how he should run the world.   
        -- Neils Bohr

Teaching is most effective in those happy dispositions where it is almost
superfluous.  
        -- Gibbons

What you do in this world is matter of no consequence. The question is what
you can make people believe that you have done.   
        -- Sherlock Holmes

Scrupulous accuracy about such a small amount is a sign of vain conceit
rather than love of truth.  
        -- Ptolemaus Ptolemy

In the history of science, no one is ever the first to do anything.   
        -- David Hull

There is something fascinating about the sciences. One gets such wholesale
returns of conjectures out of such trifling investment of fact.   
        -- Mark Twain

LECTURE: Fundamentally a star is a very simple structure... 
AUDIENCE: You would look pretty simple too, at a distance of 10 parsecs. 
        -- Cambridge U.

A hypothesis or theory is clear, desirable and positive, but it is believed
by no one but the man who created it. Experimental findings, on the other
hand, are messy, inexact things which are already believed by everyone
except the man who did the work.  
        -- Harlow Shapley

The roads by which men arrive at their insights into celestial matters seem
to almost as worthy of wonder as those matters in themselves.   
        -- Johannes Kepler

The eternal silence of infinite space terrifies me.   
        -- Pascal

In questions of science the authority of thousands is not worth the humble
reasoning of a single individual.  
        -- Galileo Galilei

It is easy to distinguish those who argue from fact and those who argue
from notions... Thus it is from astronomical observation that we derive the
principles of astronomical science.
        -- Aristotle

I accept the universe.  
        -- A Youth
You'd better!  
        -- Thomas Carlyle

Which is more useful, the Sun or the Moon? The moon is the more useful
since it gives us light during the night, when it is dark; whereas the Sun
shines only in the daytime, when it is light anyway.   
        -- George Gamow

There are numerous Earths around their Suns, no worse and no less inhabited
than this globe of ours.  
        -- Giordano Bruno

Unanimity can, of course reached by expelling the minority as
pseudo-scientists or cranks.
        -- Imre Lakatos

A practical man is a man who practices the errors of his forefathers. 
        -- Lord Beaconsfield

"Unfortunately, we're using the same language to talk about the language we're
talking about."
        --Donna Jo Napoli in Linguistics 1 this morning

Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up.
        -- William Minzer

It does not matter much what a man hates provided he hates something.
        -- Samuel Butler

"Once, galactic empires might have seemed a Posthuman domain.  Now, sadly,
even interplanetary ones are."
                Vernor Vinge, on technological singularity

Tell me something, if this world is so insane/is it making you sane again
to/let another man tug at the thread that pulls up your empty wooden head?
        --"You happy puppet," Blind Man's Zoo 10,000 Maniacs

They say it's only vanity that writes the plays we act.
They tell me that's what everybody knows.
There's no such thing as sanity and that's the sanest fact.
That's the way the story goes.
        --"One world", Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits

These mist covered mountains are a home now for me,
But my home is the lowlands, and always will be.
Someday you'll return to your valley's and your farms
And you'll no longer burn to be Brothers in Arms.
        --"Brothers in Arms", Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits

Live!  Live all you can!  It's a shame not to...
        -- unknown

Michael Jackson in Disneyland, 
Don't have to share with nobody else.
Lock the gates, Goofy, take my hand,
And lead me through the world of self.
        --"Splendid Isolation" Transverse City,  Warren Zevon

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply asI dream over the
black dots representing towns and villages on a map.  Why, I ask myself,
shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on
the map of France?
        --Vincent van Gogh

To search for perfection is all very well,
but to look for Heaven is to live here in Hell.
        --"Consider me gone",  Dream of the Blue Turtles,  Sting

I have a high regard for our species, for all its newness and immaturity as
a member of the biosphere.  As evolutionary time is measured, we arrived
here only a few moments ago and we have a lot of growing up to do.  If we
succeed, we could become a sort of collective mind for the Earth, the
thought of the Earth.  At the moment, for all our juvenility as a species,
we are surely the brightest and brainiest of the Earth's working parts.  I
trust us to have the will to keep going, and to maintain as best we can the
life of the planet.
        --Lewis Thomas

Father, what else did you leave for me?
        --"Another Brick in the Wall, Part I", The Wall, Pink Floyd

The Father, the Sin and the Holy Gross.
        --Arkham Asylum, Grant Morrison

In ancient times there was a country who's harvest came in and it was
poisoned.  Those who ate of it became insane.  "There is but one thing to
do," said the King, "We must eat the grain to survive, but there must be
those among us who will remember that we are insane."
        --unknown

The lunatic is in the hall,
The lunatics are in the hall,
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
and everyday the paper boy brings more.
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no moon upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings, too...
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.
The lunatic is in my head
The lunatics re in my head
You raise the blade, you make the change
You rearrange me till I'm sane...
You lock the door, and throw away the key
There's someone in my head, but it's not me...
        --"Brain Damage", Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't hep that," said the Cat.  "We're all mad here.  I'm mad,
you're mad."
"how do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"you must be," said the Cat, "Or else you wouldn't have come here."
        --Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,  Lewis Carrol

I see now the virtue in Madness, for this country knows no law nor any
boundary.  I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is
sanity.  All things are possible here and I am what madness has made me. 
Whole.  And complete.  And free at last.
        --Arkham Asylum,  Grant Morrison

First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out,
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out,
because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists and I did not speak out,
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
        --Pastor Neimoeller (Nazi Victim)

And so we are told "This is the Golden Age"
But gold is the reason for the wars we wage.
        --"New Year's Day", U2

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love.
        --William Butler Yeats

If you're going to cock it up, you might as well do it in front of billions
of people.
        --Bob Geldof   re: Live Aid `86

Have we come only to sleep?
have we come only to dream?
No it's not true
It's not true
We have come to rule the Earth.
        --Anon.

When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
When the hurly-burly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.
        --Macbeth

Hell is truth seen too late.
        --Locke

Avoid extinction, don't be a dodo.
        --unknown

There is nothing like dream to create the future.
        --Victor Hugo

I don't want to spend the rest of my life
Looking at the barrel of a normal life.
I don't want to spend the rest of my days
Keeping out of trouble as a soldier says.
I don't want to spend my time in hell
Looking at the walls of a prison cell.
I don't ever want to play the part
Of a statistic on a Government Chart.
        --"Invisible Sun", The Police

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.  It is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
        --Macbeth

The people of the world respect a nation that can see beyond its own image.
        --JFK

I saw a flower by the walk,
As I went to class today,
I did not stop to hear it talk.
I wonder what it had to say?
        --Charles Danforth (7-90)

The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in it's belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from Earth, loosened from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
        --Randal Jarrell

Five Ways to Kill a Man
        There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man:  you can make him
carry a plank of wood to the top of a hill and nail him to it.  
to do this properly you require a crowd of people wearing sandals, a cock
that crows, a cloak to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one man to
hammer the nails home.
        Or you can take a length of steel, shaped and chased in a
traditional way, and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.  But for
this you need white horses, English trees, men with bows and arrows, at
least two flags, a prince and a castle to hold your banquet in.
        Dispensing with nobility, you man, if the wind allows, blow gas at
him.  But then you need a mile of mud sliced through with ditches, not to
mention black boots, bomb craters, more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen
songs, and some round hats made of steel.
        In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly miles above your victim and
dispose of him by pressing one small switch.  All you then require is an
ocean to separate you, two systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and land that no one needs for several
years.
        These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man.  Simpler,
direct, and much more neat is to see that he is living somewhere in the
middle of the twentieth century, and leave him there.
        --Edwin Brock

Today I wanted 
Desperately to sing a song
But I knew no words.
        --anon. (SPS ASP 90) 

Evil is the nature of mankind.  Welcome again my children, to the communion
of your race.
        --Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

I am halfway through Genesis, and quite appalled by the disgraceful
behavior of all the characters involved, including God.
        --J R Ackerley

Do the angels depart with the devils?
        --Lance Morrow

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of
the mysterious.  It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of
all serious endeavor in art and in science....  He who never had this
experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind.  The sense that
behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind
cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and
as feeble reflection, this is religiousness.  In this sense I am religious.
 To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to
grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there
is.
        --Albert Einstein

From our home on earth we look out into the distances and strive to imagine
the sort of world into which we are born.  Today we have reached far out
into space.  Our immediate neighborhood we know intimately.  But with
increasing distance our knowledge fades... until at the last dim horizon we
search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely
more substantial.  The search will continue.  The urge is older than
history.  It is not satisfied and it will not be suppressed.
        --Edwin Hubble

I have often heard it said that there is no such thing as a free lunch.  It
now appears possible that the universe itself is a free lunch.
        --Alan Guth

In the time when Dendid created all things
He created the sun,
And the sun is born, and dies, and comes again;
He created the moon,
And the moon is born, and dies, and comes again;
He created the stars,
And the stars are born, and die, and come again;
He created man,
And man is born, and dies, and never comes again.
        --African Song

I'm out to give people a shock.
        --M C Escher

Against boredom, even the gods themselves struggle in vain.
        --Nietzsche

The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep
all its eggs in.
        --Robert A. Heinlein

When Adam farmed and Eve span,
        Kyrie Eleison,
Who was then the gentleman?
        Kyrie Eleison.
        --Marching song of the Black Company during Peasant Revolt, Germany 1525

Day of wrath, and doom impending
        David's word with Sibyl's blending:
        Heaven and earth in ashes ending.
What shall I, frail man, be pleading?
        Who for me be interceding,
        When the just are mercy  needing.
        --Dies Irae

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient
solutions;  both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
        --H. PoincarŽ

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
        --Arthur C. Clarke

The tree that grows too high attracts the attention of people with axes.
        --"The Children's Hour"  Jerry Pournelle and S M Stirling

It is an odd feeling saying farewell;  there is envy in it.
        --Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen

You've go some "Star-Spangled" nails in your coffin, kid.  That's what
they've done for you.
        --Richard Brautigan

One must pay dearly for immortality:  one has to die several times while
still alive.
        --Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

It is to a poet a thing of awe to find that his story is true.
        --Isak Dinesen, "The Diver"

If I were you, I would let no man be my equal.  --Osceola

So your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the
mind of each of the people whom you meet and live with, into a likeness, a
caricature of yourself, with still lives on and pretends to be, in some way
the truth about you.  Even a flattering picture is a caricature and a lie.
        --Isak Dinesen, "The Roads Around Pisa"

Life was easy when it was boring.  --The Police

Cowboys is Faggots!  --Sid Vicious

Sometimes I feel like--this is crazy:  my world is filled with rude,
emotionally stunted overgrown children who can't play their instruments and
have eggs for brains and just want to take my money and sell me some
illusion about rebellion and leave me half deaf and full of snotty values. 
And not only that, we're supposed to spend our lives glorifying
it--pretending it has some sort of positive impact on humanity--when the
people who trek across mountains bringing medical supplies to earthquake
victims, they probably listen to classical music or something.
        --Celia Farber

All of life, except for maybe 1 percent, is like that.  The cat will only
jump a few times in your life, and that's if you're lucky.  Rock'n'roll is
strictly about making that cat jump and when it does--there's your
"soul"--you know the feeling:   like your blood suddenly turned to rocket
fuel and you want to start smashing things or diving off cliffs.  It's the
opposite of classical music, but it's not the opposite of love.  It's
Dionysus electrified, and it's easier when you're young.
        --Celia Farber

How do you slam-dance once you've realized that Life is nobody's fault?
        --Celia Farber

When something's being rammed down your throat it's very hard to want it
anymore.
        --Celia Farber

Good art doesn't lose anything by being commercial--just the opposite, it
gains velocity and reach.  The enemy of art is not success--Heaven forbid,
that's too rarely the reward as it is.  It's the seduction away from
principles that's the enemy.  And it takes strength to resist it.
        --Bob Guccione, Jr.  Editor of SPIN

There is soul beyond James Brown.  --"Another Life,"  Big Dipper

Travel is intensified living--maximum thrills per minute.  It's one of the
last great sources of legal adventure.
        --Rick Steves, Europe through the Back Door

The Barcelona shoe-shine man will charge you $8.00 and people everywhere
put strange and wondrous things in their stomachs.
        --Rick Steves, Europe through the Back Door

It is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is.
 Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men
and beasts;  where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.
        --Henry David Thoreau

No, Mother, I'm not wrong, not a bit. You might have been told:  "Your son
rioted!"  "Your son disrupted law and order!"  But Mother, do you know: 
What kind of law and order I am disrupting?  Is it wrong to fight for
democracy and freedom?...  It is precisely because I want to help build up
China into a land where people can enjoy democracy to the fullest extent
that I disrupt the so-called law and order!
        At present we are all fainting, we may fall any moment, but soon
trees of enlightenment will grow up where we fall.  Cry not for me, mother.
 Shed no tears.  But slacken not to water the trees with your loving care. 
Surely god will bless the growth of enlightenment in China that soon will
shelter all its people.
        --Tiananmen Hunger Striker

Our cities are crime-haunted dying grounds.  Huge sectors of our youth--and
countless others--face permanent unemployment.  Those of us who work find
our paychecks able to purchase less and less.  Neither the courts nor the
prisons contribute to anything resembling justice or reformation.  The
schools are unable--or unwilling--to educate our children for the real
world of our struggles. Meanwhile, the officially approved epidemic of
drugs threatens to wipe out the minds and strength of our best young
warriors.
        --the Gary Convention Declaration, 1972

In the United States, young people are more often seen as necessary evils,
as targeted consumers, as hedonistic creators of major social problems, or
at best as unprepared and reluctant apprentices being trained to compete to
fill whatever job slots the operation of 'the free market' makes available.
        --Dr. Vincent Harding, "Hope and History"

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.  --Emerson

...people, when they cannot deal with serious problems that cause them
anxiety through technological or organizational means, try to do so through
the manipulation of supernatural beings and powers.
        --William A Haviland, from Anthropology, 4th ed.

Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it.  --Jules Renard

Human beings are like tea bags.  You don't know your own strength until you
get into hot water.
        --Bruce Laingen, former Iranian hostage

Without scientific progress the national health would deteriorate;  without
scientific progress we would not hope for improvement in our standard of
living or for an increased number of jobs for our citizens;  and without
scientific progress we could not have maintained our liberties against
tyranny.
        --Vannevar Bush,  Science: The Endless Frontier, 1945

The future has a habit of suddenly and dramatically becoming the present. 
--anonymous?

Bees do it;  do WASPs?  --Richard Brookhiser

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the
conditions, now what happens next?  --Richard P Feynman

Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial. 
--Thomas S Kuhn

Life in it's purest form is pass/fail.  --Zans

There's a kind of freedom in being completely screwed, 'cause you know
things can't get any worse.  --"The Freshman"

The course of true love gathers no moss.  --"Philadelphia Story"

the time to make up your mind about people is never.  --"Philadelphia Story"

"are you flesh or are you spirit"
"I am sadness."
        -- paraphrased from Ladyhawk.

Save the whales!  Collect the whole set.  -- Sun Fortune prog.

I'm looking for the right man but in the meantime have a great time with
the wrong ones.  -- Tricia's keychain

On second thought, I think I am more crazy than my goat.  -- Remedios Varo