"Reality is only just a word."
--Harry Chapin
"Tell the truth and run."
--(Yugoslav proverb)
"One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live
proudly."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
"No job too dirty for the fucking scientists."
--William S. Burroughs
"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names."
--John F. Kennedy
"The challenge is great...the task immense...the time is now!"
--Victor Hugo
"Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty."
--The Bene Gesserit Coda
"It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to
push this button."
--John Brunner
"People who trivialize get what they deserve: not much."
--Christian Molick
"Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get."
--W. P. Kinsella
"I'm an openly gay trailer-trash Mexican. How could they not love me?"
--Rudy Galindo.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a
great soul has simply nothing to do."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our
facility with language."
--J. Michael Straczynski
"Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat."
--Arn Anderson
"The significance of that is that's my beer openin' hand."
--Arn Anderson
"There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were
broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise
and horror."
--W. Somerset Maugham
"My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do
you suppose I care?"
--Marquis de Sade
"Nobody's interested in sweetness and light."
--Hedda Hopper, on gossip
"To do nothing is also a good remedy."
--Hippocrates
"The want of a thing is perplexing enough, but the possession of it
is intolerable."
--John Vanbrugh
"You have offended yourself. I have done nothing but exist."
--Scott Safier
"Any idiot can face a crisis--it's this day-to-day living
that wears you out."
--Anton Chekhov
"It wasn't until I had performed by first autopsy that I
realized that even the drabest human exteriors could contain
the most beautiful viscera. After that, I would console myself
for the plainness of my fellow bus-riders by dissecting them
in my imagination."
--J. B. S. Haldane
"You may be capable of great things, but life consists of small things."
--Deng Ming-Dao
"Of course I'm drunk! What do you think I am? A stunt driver?"
--Seen on a bumper sticker
"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know
that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and
then they would actually change their minds and you never hear
that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't
happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and
change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot
recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or
religion."
--Carl Sagan
"A leading architect once built a cluster of office buildings set in a
central green. The landscape crew asked him where he wanted the
sidewalks between the buildings. His reply: 'Just plant grass between
the buildings.' By late summer the new lawn was laced with pathways
of trodden grass. The paths followed the most efficient line between
the points of connection, turned in easy curves rather than at right
angles and were sized according to traffic flow. In the fall the
architect simply paved in the pathways. Not only did the paths have a
design beauty, but they responded directly to user needs."
--Christopher Williams, "Origins of Form"
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to
function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are
hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth."
--Ken Dykes
"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention
of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of
attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the
overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
--Nobel laureate economist Herbert Simon
"I dyde shyte thre grete toordes."
--Fables of Aesop, Caxton translation V15, 1484
"We need help desperately. Thousands of people are dead."
--Shamshul Haq Arianfar on the Afgan earthquake 1 June 1998
"I lost the love of all the homosexuals in the world by saying
that Princess Diana was trash and got what she deserved. She
could have been Queen of England -- and she was swanning about
Paris with Arabs. What disgraceful behavior. Going about saying
she wanted to be the queen of hearts. The vulgarity of it is so
overpowering."
--Gay author Quentin Crisp to Atlanta's Southern Voice, 1 July 1999
"When I was young, we thought that Oscar Wilde was a great
nobleman who had thrown his life away for love. Nothing could be
less true. He slept with East Enders who were procured for him by
Lord Alfred Douglas. He knew them only 'in Braille' -- the
curtains were never drawn back in the rooms in Oxford where he
met those boys. It was the most sordid life you can imagine. And
he was bleating about love and dragging the fair name of Mr.
Plato into the trial -- after a life like that?"
--Gay author Quentin Crisp to Atlanta's Southern Voice, 1 July 1999
"When I was in the N.F.L., I had group sex involving women as a
way to have sex with men, often other athletes."
--Former pro football player Dave Kopay to The New York
Times