This page contains many (too many!) quotes that I find funny or interesting. They are roughly grouped by topic, although many that would fit into several topics are just kind of stuck in one or another. There are also some
jokes and other not-quite quotes if you aren't into quotes.
Women & Relationships
"Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There's too much fraternizing with the enemy." -- Henry Kissinger
"I know that somewhere in the Universe exists my perfect soulmate — but looking for her is much more difficult than just staying at home and ordering another pizza." — Alf Whit.
"We learn to love not by finding a "perfect" person but by learning to see an "imperfect" person perfectly." -- Anonymous
"Love me for my mind and not for my body, Play with my body and not with my mind!" -- Anonymous
"The most important thing in communication is
hearing what isn't being said." -- Anonymous
"Two may talk together under the same roof for many years, yet never really meet; and two others at first speech are old friends."-- Mary Catherwood
"For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.'" -- John Greenleaf Whittier
"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius." -- Mozart
"No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them." -- Otto Weininger (:-P)
“Love is giving someone the power to break your heart, and trusting they will not use it." -- Joyce Cousins
“A woman’s dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.” —- Sophia Loren
Self
"Nobody's perfect, so I guess I must be a Nobody." -- Anonymous
"The Future is no place to place your better days." -- Dave Matthews
"Letting go does not mean giving up but accepting that there are things that cannot be." -- Anonymous
"Childhood is that state which ends the moment a puddle is first viewed as an obstacle instead of an opportunity." -- Anonymous
"My problem with most athletic challenges is training. I'm lazy and find that
workouts cut into my drinking time." -- Dave Barry
"Always remember you're unique, just like
everyone else." -- Anonymous
"It's good to know that if I behave strangely
enough, society will take full responsibility for me." --Ashleigh Brilliant
"The failure to fully contemplate an idea is
often mistaken for optimism." --Albert Einstein
"Those who think they have no time for bodily exercise will, sooner or later, have to find time for illness." --- Edward Stanley, Earl of Derby, 1873
"Confidence, like art, never comes from having all the answers; it comes from being open to all the questions." -- Earl Gray Stevens
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." — Robert A. Heinlein
"For after all, the best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain." -- Henry Longfellow
"Love is merely a bandage, an oasis in hell, a raft in a tempestuous sea. It keeps us from facing the truth-that no matter who we are or what we are, we are all alone. Ultimately, we are all alone." -- Andrew Neiderman, The Need
"Anger is a symptom, a way of cloaking and expressing feelings too awful to experience directly: hurt, bitterness, grief and, most of all, fear." -- Joan Rivers
"Every pleasure is in itself good, but not all are to be chosen." -- Epicurus
“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.” -— Thomas Jefferson
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.” -— Helen Keller
Life
"Every aspect of our lives is, in a sense, a vote for the kind of world we want to live in." - Frances Moore Lappe
"I said in my heart, I am sick of four walls and a ceiling, I have need of the sky, I have business with the grass." -- Fin de Siecle
"Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them." -- Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh
"There are clubs you can't belong to, neighborhoods you can't live in, schools you can't get into, but the roads are always open." -- Nike
"A drunken man's words are a sober man's
thoughts." -- Mark Twain
"The truth is just an excuse for a lack of
imagination." - Garak, ST-DS9
"If you cannot accept the possibility that
what you believe is false, then neither can you ever know truth." -- Anonymous
"There is nothing so easy that it cannot be
done wrong." -- Anonymous
"A good name, like good will, is got by many
actions and lost by one." -- Lord Jefery
"Sleep... Oh! how I loathe those little slices of death...." -- Longfellow
"When choosing between two evils, I always
like to try the one I've never tried before." --Mae West
"There are only two rules for success: 1.
Never tell everything you know. 2. See #1." -- Anonymous
"The bad thing about experience is that it
teachs things you dont want to know." -- Anonymous
"Make it idiot proof and someone will make a
better idiot." -- Anonymous
"To turn $100 into $110 is work. To turn $100
million into $110 million is inevitable." -- Edgar Bronfman
"Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon...everything's different." -- Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes
"Disce quasi semper victurus; vive quasi cras moriturus." -- Proverb
"Cras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit cras amet." -- Proverb
"Crudelius est quam mori semper timere mortem" -- Proverb
"Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds." -- Buddha
"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained." -- Mark Twain
"Be the change you want to see in the world." -- Mahatma Gandhi
"Yesterday is a dream, tomorrow but a vision. But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore to this day." -- Sanskrit Proverb
"I believe in a long, prolonged derangement of the senses in order to obtain the unknown." -- Jim Morrison
"Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free." -- Jim Morrison
"If I had one wish it would be to have no reason to make one." -- Unknown
"I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch and you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for highschool. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities. You become a little baby, you go back into the womb, spend your last nine months floating... and finish off as an orgasm." -- George Carlin
"If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other cause for prejudice by noon." -- George Aiken
War & Government
"The whole idea of the military strikes me as completely
absurd. I do not understand the desire to pick up a gun and go off and shoot strangers
when there are so many loved ones I'd like to take a shot at first." -- E.L. Greggory
"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die
for his." -- General Patton
"More than 200 handguns have been stolen in New Zealand so far this year. Police are concerned that some may fall into the hands of criminals." -- One Network News
"If pro is opposite of con, then what is the opposite of
progress?" -- Men's restroom, House of Representatives. Washington, D.C.
"I know not with what weapons World War III will
be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert
Einstein
"Probably all laws are useless; for good men
do not want laws at all, and bad men are made no better by them." - Demonax (c 150
A.D.)
"I can picture in my mind a world without
war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never
expect it." -- Jack Handy
"A goverment is like a fire: a handy servant,
but a dangerous master." -- George Washington
"I was recently on a tour of Latin America,
and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could
converse with those people." -- George W. Bush
"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." -- Orson Welles
Religion & Evolution
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
-- Richard Dawkins
"Organized religion destroys who we are or who we can be by inhibiting our actions and decisions out of fear of an intangible parent-figure who shakes a finger at us from thousands of years ago and says 'Do it, do it or I'll fucking spank you!'" -- Dogma
"A friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew who observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a Tooth Fairy Agnostic. He will not call himself an atheist because it is in principle impossible to prove a negative. But 'agnostic' on its own might suggest that he though God's existence or non-existence equally likely. In fact, though strictly agnostic about god, he considers God's existence no more probable than the Tooth Fairy's.
Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.
The list of things about which we strictly have to be agnostic doesn't stop at tooth fairies and celestial teapots. It is infinite. If you want to believe in a particular one of them -- teapots, unicorns, or tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why you believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not. We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't' have to bother saying so." -- Richard Dawkins
"People sometimes try to score debating points by saying, 'Evolution is only a theory.' That is correct, but it's important to understand what that means. It is also only a theory that the world goes round the Sun -- it's just a theory for which there is an immense amount of evidence.
There are many scientific theories that are in doubt. Even within evolution, there is some room for controversy. But that we are cousins of apes and jackals and starfish, let's say, that is a fact in the ordinary sense of the word." -- Richard Dawkins
"Natural selection is like the story of two hikers who see a bear charging at them from a distance. One of them starts frantically putting on his running shoes. His friend shouts at him that that is useless; you can't outrun a bear. And the first guy shouts back: 'I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you!'" -- Paul Bloom
Technology & Science
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML
buttons say 'Submit'?" -- Chad Okere
"I think there is a world market for maybe
five computers." --Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
"There is no reason anyone would want a
computer in their home." --Ken Olson, 1977
"To steal from one is plagiarism; to steal
from many is research." -- Anonymous
"Science is like sex: sometimes something
useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it." -- Richard Feynman
"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings
to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no
value to us." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876.
"The wireless music box has no imaginable
commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" --David
Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.
"The concept is interesting and well-formed,
but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible." --A Yale
University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable
overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic." -- Aurther C. Clarke
"In case you're not a computer person, I
should probably point out that 'Real Soon Now' is a technical term meaning 'sometime
before the heat-death of the universe, maybe'." -- Scott Fahlman
"A computer program will always do what you
tell it to do, but rarely what you want it to do." -- Murphy's Laws for Computers
"Most people use statistics the way a
drunkard uses a lamp post, more for support than illumination." -- Mark Twain
"There are two ways of constructing software.
One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. The other way is
to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." -- C.A.R. Hoare
"Those who believe without reason cannot be
convinced by reason." -- James Randi
"The day Microsoft makes a product that
doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner." -- Anonymous
“If the 20th century has taught us anything, it is to be cautious about the word impossible.” -— Charles Platt in Wired
"To understand recursion, one must first understand the concept of recursion."
"A polar bear is a rectangular bear after you multiply by the jacobian of the coordinate transform."
Heisenberg is driving down the autobahn. A police officer pulls him over.
The officer says, "Excuse me, sir, do you know how fast you were going?"
Heisenberg says, "No, but I know where I am."
Misc Humor
"Two wrongs may not make a right, but three lefts do." -- Anonymous
"If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?" -- Anonymous
"I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my
grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers." -- Sverre Slotte
"Very funny Scotty! Now beam down my
clothes!" -- Some Guy
"Do you know how dumb the average person is?
Does it scare you that by definition half of the world is even dumber than that?"
“Serial killers always say, ‘I heard voices.’ Why don’t those voices ever say, ‘Go dancing’ or ‘Bake a cake’?" -— Dexter Madison
"Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine."
"Sometimes I wake up grumpy; other times I let her sleep."
"Give me ambiguity or give me something else."
"Sex on television can't hurt you unless you fall off."
"99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name."
"Anything worth taking seriously is worth making fun of."
"Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don't have film."
"Make something idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot."
"The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket."
"The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math."
"Reality is an illusion caused by lack of alcohol."
"College is a fountain of knowledge, and the students are there to drink."
"Adversity: That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable."
"Quitters never win and winners never quit, but those who never win and never quit are idiots."
"Underachievement: The tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut by the lawnmower."
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