Quote File

The following quotes are some of my favorites. Enjoy!

Cartoons & Comics

"I don't wanna play Leona Helmsley!" - Elmyra Duff, Tiny Toons Xmas

"Someday, Weederman, we'll look back on all this and laugh. It will probably be one of those deep, eerie ones that slowly builds to a blood-curdling maniacal scream... but still it will be a laugh." - Mister Boffo

"Now I'm remembering the time Cheeks became Dark Cheeks and - no, I can't!! I won't pander to the X-fans, not even in a flashback!" - Ambush Bug

"Fortunately for us, with great power comes no appreciable increase in intelligence..." - Damage Control

"Now I'm having serious trouble believing that he died in a mugging. He didn't seem the type." - Larry Niven, on the death of Superman

"To tell the truth, I don't think I would've chosen a dark, drippy cave as a clubhouse for a group of borderline depressive teen-agers, Polar Boy." - Chlorophyll Kid

"Now I've got the bead on you with MY disintegrating gun. And when it disintegrates, it disintegrates. [Pulls trigger] Well, what do you know - it disintegrated." - Duck Dodgers in the 24-1/2 Century!!

Gaming & War(gaming)

"Wizards don't die; they're just metaphysically inconvenienced." - Trancers IV

"Worst piece of military strategy award: mime front line giving the enemy the impression of an invisible impenetrable wall." - Mister Boffo

"There is no heroism in vanquishing a weakling or a fool." - Irwin R. Blacker

"The only war is the war you fought in. Every veteran knows that." - Allan Keller

Literature & Writing

"Cosmic upheaval is not so moving as a little child pondering the death of a sparrow in the corner of a barn." - Thomas Savage

"We are all refugees of a future that never happened." - Lee Weiner

"I've made up stuff that's turned out to be real, that's the spooky part." - Tom Clancy

"If there's a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works." - John Dos Passos

"A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands... so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to the war with the forces of oblivion." - Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

"I don't believe that a committee can write a book." - Arnold Toynbee

Paranoia & Secret Operations

"The Xerox machine is one of the biggest threats to national security ever devised." - Adm. Thomas Moorer, US Navy ret.

"You take a fraction of reality and expand on it. It's very seldom totally at odds with the facts... It's shaving a piece of reality off." - Frank Snepp, former CIA agent, on disinformation

"Paranoia... is just having all the facts." - William S. Burroughs

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered." - Number 6

Politics

"You're either with us or against us vermin, that's what freedom's all about!" - Sgt. Preston Roach

"Well, I don't have much job security." - Bill Clinton, on why he still plays the saxophone.

"This is like saying how likely I am to jump over a tall building in a single bound - unlikely. This is like asking is lightning going to strike here in the next two seconds - I don't think so." - Ross Perot, on whether he would resume his candidacy

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes." ["Who watches the watchmen?"] - Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347 (Quoted as the epigraph of the Tower Commission Report, 1987)

"I should have caught the mistake on that spelling bee card. But as Mark Twain once said, `You should never trust a man who has only one way to spell a word.'" - Dan Quayle, quoting Andrew Jackson (as quoted by Moriarty)

"People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history." - Dan Quayle gives his opinion of the book Nicholas and Alexandra (9/28/88)

"I don't believe in the basic concept that someone should make their whole career in public service." - Former Vice President (former senator, former congressman, etc.) Dan Quayle

"Judgment comes from experience and great judgment comes from bad experience." - Sen. Bob Packwood

"I let the American people down." - Richard M. Nixon

"I voted for you during your last election." - Mao Zedong, to Richard Nixon

"Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!" - Nikita S. Khrushchev

"Liberty is always unfinished business." - ACLU Annual Report, 1955/56

"Broke, hungry people, particularly those with prior military training, have a nasty tendency to revolt against those in power." - J. R. Grimble, Sweet Myth-tery of Life (by Robert Asprin)

"All this talk about peace and understanding makes me nervous." - Lord Bowler, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., "Wild Card"

"Anarchy doesn't work when you slip on your ass." - Bob Goldthwait

Science, Math & Computers

"What kind of truck is it, Thing?" said Gurder.
"It is a helicopter."
"It's certainly noisy," said Gurder, who had never come across the word.
"It is a plane without wings," said Angalo, who had.
Gurder gave this a few moments' careful and terrified thought.
"Thing?" he said slowly.
"Yes?"
"What keeps it up in the--" Gurder began.
"Science."
"Oh. Well. Science? Good. That's all right, then."
- from Wings (the Third Book of the Bromeliad) by Terry Pratchett

"The meta-Turing test counts a thing as intelligent if it seeks to devise and apply Turing tests to objects of its own creation." - Lew Mammel, Jr.

"I was asking myself, `Why would anyone try to ionize glial cells using a pulse-encoded tachyon field?'"
"I've often wondered that myself."
- Dax and Sisko, ST:DS9: The Passenger

"The inability of snakes to count is actually a refusal, on their part, to appreciate the cardinal number system." - Actual Facts

"They don't let us beat students anymore, but my fantasy life is my own business." - Prof. Ralph Noble

"I took a physics course that was so hard I couldn't find the classroom." - Steve Connelly

"Science: A way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us the whole time. So does religion, but science is better because it comes up with more understandable results when it is wrong. There is a lot more Science than you think." - Wings, Terry Pratchett

"Spontaneous combustion! What a stroke of luck!" - Sam & Max

"It's a UNIX system. I know this!" - Lex, Jurassic Park (the movie)

"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically." - Albert Einstein

"To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate made me an authority myself." - Albert Einstein

"Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler." - Albert Einstein

"Part of the art of teaching is not to tell the truth completely." - Kurt Gottfried

"It's a standard thing in physics to simplify things by using more and more obscure notation." - Kurt Gottfried

"You don't know anything, but you have a big computer at your disposal -- this is getting to be a real disease." - Kurt Gottfried

"Even in quantum mechanics you can't divide by zero." - Kurt Gottfried

"The real universe is always one step beyond logic." - Frank Herbert

"The only way for a new theory to become accepted is for adherents of the old theories to die." - Max Planck

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." - Disraeli

"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton

"In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand." - Gerald Holton

"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." - Hal Abelson

"In computer science, we stand on each other's feet." - Brian K. Reid

Grab Bag

"A day without sunshine is kind of like night." - Mike Jittlov

"A child is a person who can't understand why someone would give away a perfectly good kitten." - Doug Larson

"Should `anal retentive' have a hyphen?" - unidentified passing t-shirt

"Excuse me - which murder are we talking about?" - Alphonse D'Arco, mobster

"To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell." - Buddhist proverb

"Heresy is the side that loses." - J. V. Fleming

"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious." - George Orwell

David S. Carter -- david.s.carter@umich.edu