Nicholas Russon's Quotations Archive: The Letter S

The explosion of the Challenger, after twenty-four consecutive successful shuttle flights, grounded all manned space missions by the U.S. for more than two years. The delay barely evoked comment [. . .] But contrast the early history of aviation, when 31 of the first 40 pilots hired by the Post Office died in crashes within six years, with no suspension of service.

C. Owen Paepke

Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world.

Mary Shafer

Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

Anonymous

Not that I have great nostalgia for my old high school — that whole period seems to have been performed by something with less sense and more hair, someone I hardly remember, someone whose handwriting doesn't look like mine at all. Most of what I recall embarrasses me.

James Lileks

Unnamed Law: If it happens, it must be possible.

Anonymous

The universe isn't expanding . . . we're just getting smaller.

Anonymous

Engineers think that theory approximates reality. Physicists think that reality approximates theory. Mathematicians never make the connection.

Anonymous

One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions.

Anonymous

The Futility Factor: No experiment is useless. It can always serve as a bad example.

Anonymous

The Law of Thermodynamics: You can't win. You can't break even. You can't leave the game.

Anonymous

Asimov's Corollory to Clarke's First Law: When the lay public rallies round to an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists, and supports that idea with great fervour and emotion, the distinguished, but elderly scientists are then, after all, right.

Isaac Asimov

The big breakthrough came in the 1930s, when scientists invented a device called the electron microscope. At least they claimed they invented it. Laypersons would come around to look at it, and they'd say, "Where's the electron microscope?" And the scientists would roll their eyes and — in the tone of voice you'd use to talk to a Labrador retriever — they'd say: "You can't see it, for heaven's sake! It's made of electrons!" And the laypersons, out of pure embarrassment, would give the scientists funding. (This is also how scientists paid for the "radio telescope.")

Dave Barry

What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.

Dave Barry

This is clearly a scientific result, because it contains a decimal point.

Dave Barry

The span of time required for a thing to deteriorate to 50 percent of its original potency: about 24,000 years for plutonium atoms . . . a few centuries for great civilizations . . . three weeks for a hit song . . . four days for a child's enthusiasm over a new $90 toy . . . 24 hours for the fresh sense of purpose acquired at a motivational seminar . . . 15 minutes for the warming afterglow of a "feel-good" movie . . . ten seconds for a sudden impulse to shove the papers off your desk, slug the boss, and board the next plane to Tahiti.

Rick Bayan

Science policy is to science as birdshot is to birds.

Peter Beckman

Newtonian (adj): Pertaining to a philosophy of the universe, invented by Newton, who discovered that an apple will fall to the ground, but was unable to say why. His successors and disciples have advanced so far as to be able to say when.

Ambrose Bierce

Electricity (n): The power that causes all natural phenomena not known to be caused by something else. Electricity seems destined to play a most important part in the arts and in industries. The question of its economical application to some purposes is still unsettled, but experiment has already proved that it will propel a street car better than a gas jet and give more light than a horse.

Ambrose Bierce

Ethnology (n): The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists.

Ambrose Bierce

Lead (n): A heavy blue-gray metal much used in giving stability to light lovers particularly to those who love not wisely but other men's wives. Lead is also of great service as a counterpoise to an argument of such weight that it turns the scale of debate the wrong way. An interesting fact in the chemistry of international controversy is that at the point of contact of two patriotisms lead is precipitated in great quantities.

Ambrose Bierce

Molecule (n): The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. It is distinguished from the corpuscle, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter, by a closer resemblance to the atom, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. Three great scientific theories of the structure of the Universe are the molecular, the corpuscular, and the atomic. A forth affirms, with Haeckel, the condensation or precipitation of matter from ether whose existence is proved by the condensation or precipitation. The present trend of scientific thought is toward the theory of ions. The ion differs from the molecule, corpuscle and atom in that it is an ion. A fifth theory is held by idiots, but it is doubtful that they know any more about the matter than the others.

Ambrose Bierce

Gravitation (n): The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportioned to the quantity of matter they contain the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A.

Ambrose Bierce

Potable (n): Suitable for drinking. Water is said to be potable; indeed some declare it our natural beverage, although even they find it palatable only when suffering from the recurrent disorder known as thirst, for which it is a medicine. Upon nothing has so great and diligent ingenuity been brought to bear in all ages and in all countries, except the most uncivilized, as upon the invention of substitutes for water. To hold that this general aversion to that liquid has no basis in the preservative instinct of the race is to be unscientific and without science we are as the snakes and toads.

Ambrose Bierce

Telescope (n): A device having a relation to the eye similar to that of the telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a multitude of needless details. Luckily it is unprovided with a bell summoning us to the sacrifice.

Ambrose Bierce

Barometer (n): An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having.

Ambrose Bierce

Magnet (n): Something acted upon by magnetism.
Magnetism (n): Something acting upon a magnet. The two definitions immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge.

Ambrose Bierce

I do wonder, if Schrodinger had just put a rat or a cockroach in his box, would anyone have cared? The course of 20th Century physics might have been entirely different, if everyone hadn't been so worried about that poor cat . . .

Lois McMaster Bujold

Behavioural Psychology: The science of pulling habits out of rats.

Douglas Busch

Clarke's First Law (reformulated): When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Perhaps the adjective "elderly" requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!

Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished, but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke's Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke had suggested that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic — referring to a possible encounter with an alien civilization — but if a science journalist had one responsibility above all else, it was to keep Clarke's Law from applying to human technology in human eyes.

Greg Egan

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Albert Einstein

Religion without science is blind. Science without religion is lame.

Albert Einstein

In spite of the recent progress in science, the depths of human imbecility have not yet been plumbed.

H. Ellis

It is not observed that logicians are more logical men than others.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reality will not be fooled.

Richard P. Feynman

The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment.

Richard P. Feynman

It is my supposition that the Universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine.

J.B.S. Haldane

When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it makes it possible to go elsewhere.

Robert A. Heinlein

If men were the automatons that behaviourists claim they are, the behaviourist psychologists could not have invented the amazing nonsense called "Behaviourist Psychology." So they are wrong from scratch as clever and as wrong as Phlogiston Chemists.

Robert A. Heinlein

Never worry about the theory as long as the machine does what it's supposed to.

Robert A. Heinlein

Most "scientists" are bottle washers and button sorters.

Robert A. Heinlein

If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.

Robert A. Heinlein

One man's "magic" is another man's engineering. "Supernatural" is a null word.

Robert A. Heinlein

The second best thing about space travel is that the distances involved make war very difficult, usually impractical, and almost always unnecessary. This is probably a loss for most people, since war is our race's most popular diversion, one which gives purpose and colour to dull and stupid lives. But it is a great boon to the intelligent man who fights only when he must — never for sport.

Robert A. Heinlein

A Zygote is a gamete's way of producing another gamete. This may be the purpose of the universe.

Robert A. Heinlein

Cognitive Sciences: Six disciplines in search of a funding agency.

Philip Johnson-Laird

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.

Lord Kelvin

They make miniature tubes and miniature loudspeakers, but they have yet to come up with a miniature 32-foot wavelength.

Paul Klipsch

Newton's Very Very First Law . . . A government at rest tends to stay at rest; a government in motion is exceedingly unstable and tends to return to rest as quickly as possible.

John Kula

Practitioners explore; theorists pave over.

Butler Lampson

Buy an off-the-shelf power supply, and you buy off-the-shelf problems.

E. Li-Or

Scientists, the priests of the modern age, have sought to banish fat from your life. Take a look at that low-fat cake mix. The powdered eggs and tropical oils are gone. The label now reads: methadrextosepeptidebismolllah 2,4,5, with BHT to preserve freshness, THB to take freshness away, and BHT to come back and say "now quit it!" and put the freshness back, and DDT added because frankly, they have warehouses of the stuff just sitting around, dragging down the balance sheet.

James Lileks

One should never spoil a good theory by explaining it.

Peter McArthur

Bailey writes charmingly and has the knack of suggesting that he's reporting from the front lines of Science, inserting a lot of personal "guesses" and "hunches" into the prose as though he were an actual Scientist with a lifetime of serious consideration of alternative hypotheses and tons of data behind him. You can imagine Bailey with a pipe and a lab coat advertising laxatives on TV. But in his case we have what the physicist Richard Feynman used to call "cargo-cult science": The book has the style of an informal talk with a Serious Scientist who is getting down and personal with you about his science. The stuff looks a little like science, the way the "airports" the highlanders of New Guinea constructed out of coconuts and palm fronds to get the American cargo planes to come back after the war looked a little like airports. It's even in the title of his book, that Science. But sadly, it's scientific nonsense.

Deirdre McCloskey

The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.

H.L. Mencken

For the sciences, the way to change science's perception of things is to wait until all the old farts die off. That is the way we came to accept that continents drift. It isn't because anybody convinced the old guys; they died.

Larry Niven

Patrick's Theorem: If the experiment works, it must be the wrong experiment.

Patrick

Please don't assume that we're all brainwashed with that-there limp-wristed French measurement system. (I bet that few of you know that the basic unit of linear measurement in metric — the meter — was originally defined as being 1/10th the diameter of Monsieur Jules Metrique's distended anus after a thorough session of . . . research . . . at the Paris Brothel of Brotherly Science and Technology. Betcha didn't know that.)

Jonathan Piasecki

Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones, but a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

Jules-Henri Poincare

There are no foolish questions, and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.

C.P. Steinmetz

There are no foolish questions, and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.

C.P. Steinmetz

One who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of reason.

J.R.R. Tolkien

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Mark Twain

It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us - the high, the low, the rich , the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage - may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss — except the inventor of the telephone.

Mark Twain

Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

Werner von Braun

Pre-Campbellian science fiction bubbled up from the American pulp magazines of the 1910s and 1920s, inspired by pioneers like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells but mostly recycling an endless series of cardboard cliches: mad scientists, lost races, menacing bug-eyed monsters, coruscating death rays, and screaming blondes in brass underwear. With a very few exceptions (like E.E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark of Space and sequels) the stuff was teeth-jarringly bad; unless you have a specialist interest in the history of the genre I don't recommend seeking it out.

Eric S. Raymond

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

Someone once defined Cyberpunk as a sub-genre so socially conservative that it thought kids would still be spiking their hair and dying it blue 50 years from now. . .

S.M. Stirling

As far as I'm concerned, the entire concept of the Prime Directive as practiced in latter-day Star Trek is immoral. Most fans have a difficult time with this notion. It's certainly true that the overwhelming majority of Trek fans are Statists of some variety: they believe in the cult of the omnipotent state, and Star Trek — like most of what Hollywood produces — directly supports their worldview. Unfortunately, Star Trek's lasting legacy is to encourage Statism among those who might otherwise not be inclined to consider it.

William Stone III

Okay, I'm of Scottish decent, yes?

This implies a few things. First, I get into fist fights with inanimate objects very easily. Second, I place the need for vagina over the need for it to be of a certain species. Third, I can eat a can of Fix-A-Flat if it's fried. It's that last one we'll be focusing on today.

When you think native Scottish cuisine, what springs to mind?

Nothing pretty. Haggis. Fried Mars Bars. Babies.

Dong Resin

Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

Benjamin Franklin

One cannot be an individual, a person separate from others (family, society, and so forth), without having secrets. It is because secrets separate people that individualists treasure them and collectivists condemn them.

Thomas Szasz

Always keep a-hold of Nurse
for fear of finding something worse.

Hilaire Belloc

Oh! Wad some power the giftie gie us
To see ourselves as others see us.
It would frae mony a blunder free us
And foolish notion.

Robert Burns

He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage — he won't encounter many rivals.

G.C. Lichtenberg

To love oneself is the start of a lifelong affair.

Oscar Wilde

[H]is own actions make it next-to-impossible for anybody else to care about him. It's like there's an amount of Caring About [Him] in the universe that cannot be exceeded, and since he himself is using 100% of it for self-pity there's none left for anyone else to have.

Louann Miller

Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being the helpless prey of impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, drops him, promises and betrays, and crowning injury inflicts on him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself.

Paul Valery

To know yourself is the ultimate form of aggression.

Anonymous

The noble secret of laughing at yourself is the greatest humour of all.

Anonymous

Self-esteem (n): An erroneous appraisement.

Ambrose Bierce

Opiate (n): An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.

Ambrose Bierce

I is the first letter of the alphabet, the first word of the language, the first thought of the mind, the first object of affection. In grammar it is a pronoun of the first person and singular number. Its plural is said to be We, but how there can be more than one myself is doubtless clearer to the grammarians than it is to the author of this incomparable dictionary. Conception of two myselves is difficult, but fine. The frank yet graceful use of "I" distinguishes a good writer from a bad; the latter carries it with the manner of a thief trying to cloak his loot.

Ambrose Bierce

Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are

Malcolm Forbes

You've no idea what a poor opinion I have of myself, and how little I deserve it.

W.S. Gilbert

If you don't like yourself, you can't like other people.

Robert A. Heinlein

"No man is an island. . ." Much as we may feel and act as individuals, our race is a single organism, always growing and branching which must be pruned regularly to be healthy. This necessity need not be argued; anyone with eyes can see that any organism which grows without limit always dies in its own poisons. The only rational question is whether pruning is best done before or after birth. Being an incurable sentimentalist, I favour the former of these methods killing makes me queasy, even when it's a case of "He's dead and I'm alive, and that's the way I wanted it to be." But this may be a matter of taste. Some shamans think that it is better to be killed in a war, or to die in childbirth, or to starve in misery, than never to have lived at all. They may be right.But I don't have to like it and I don't.

Robert A. Heinlein

Seeing ourselves as others see us would probably confirm our worst suspicions about them.

Franklin P. Jones

He who requires much from himself and little from others will be secure from hatred.

K'ung Fu-tse

Self respect: The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

H.L. Mencken

The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.

Ayn Rand

[T]here's nothing of any importance in life — except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean.

Ayn Rand

Self-Indictment Theory: Don't undress yourself in public, and don't wear your problems on your shirt-sleeve. To do so is to provide fuel for slanderers and troublemakers.

Robert J. Ringer

"Cowardice" and "self-respect" have largely disappeared from public discourse. In their place we are offered "self-esteem" as the bellwether of success and a proxy for dignity. "Self-respect" implies that one recognizes standards, and judges oneself worthy by the degree to which one lives up to them. "Self-esteem" simply means that one feels good about oneself. "Dignity" used to refer to the self-mastery and fortitude with which a person conducted himself in the face of life's vicissitudes and the boorish behavior of others. Now, judging by campus speech codes, dignity requires that we never encounter a discouraging word and that others be coerced into acting respectfully, evidently on the assumption that we are powerless to prevent our degradation if exposed to the demeaning behavior of others. These are signposts proclaiming the insubstantiality of our character, the hollowness of our souls.

Jeffrey Snyder

In his private heart no man much respects himself.

Mark Twain

Only the shallow know themselves.

Oscar Wilde

He who requires much from himself and little from others will be secure from hatred.

Confucius

When I explain, at a person's own request, why I say that deviant behaviors (like gambling or claiming to be God) are not diseases (like cancer or diabetes), and my interlocutor says, "But that's only semantics", then I know that I am not answering his question because he hasn't asked me a question.

Thomas Szasz

Is sex dirty? Only if it's done right.

Woody Allen

Sex: even when it's bad, it's good.

Anonymous

Prostitution is sex plus free enterprise. Which are you against?

Anonymous

The difference between sex for free and sex for money, is that all too often, the free sex costs more.

Anonymous

Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Deal with it.

Anonymous

Indiscretion (n): The guilt of women.

Ambrose Bierce

Intimacy (n): A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction.

Ambrose Bierce

The pleasure is fleeting, the cost is damnable, and the position is ridiculous.

Lord Chesterfield

What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you . . . every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.

Marquis de Sade

Remember when you were a kid and the boys didn't like the girls? Only sissies liked girls? What I'm trying to tell you is that nothing's changed. You think boys grow out of not liking girls, but we don't grow out of it. We just grow horny. That's the problem. We mix up liking pussy for liking girls. Believe me, one couldn't have less to do with the other.

Jules Feiffer

Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.

Anatole France

The trainee geishas, the backs of whose heads are dressed to represent vaginas, clip-clop down the road, their smiling white faces making their teeth look like little yellow cherry stones. A geisha's raison d'être is to pour drinks, giggle behind her hand, tell men they are handsome, strong and amusing, listen to boastful lies, and never show any emotion except bliss. Occasionally, for a great deal of cash, some will allow men to copulate on them. We, of course, have geishas back in Blighty: we call them barmaids.

A.A. Gill

Traditionally, the Japanese live with their in-laws, and, in a cramped apartment with paper walls, marital harmony can be strained. So harassed couples, carrying the shopping, sidle in for half an hour's conjugal bliss. It takes the spontaneity out of sex, but then if you asked a Japanese man to do something spontaneous, he'd have to check his Palm Pilot first. To say that they appear dysfunctional when it comes to fun is missing the point.

A.A. Gill

Another interesting difference between women and men is that women can get highly, highly aroused and then forget about it instantly. If you and your lady are going at it hammer and tongs, and she's barking like a dog and clawing deep trenches in your back with her acrylic nails, and the PHONE rings, she can pick it up and instantly forget that you're there, especially if the person on the other end is talking about shoes. If you're in a dark, quiet bar, and you're talking, and the two of you start talking about sex, and things get really, really hot, you, as a man, will expect a follow-through, and if you don't get it, your hair may fall out, and you won't be able to sleep, and you may even have nightmares about Helen Thomas. But the woman can drop the topic in a second and move on to something else, and if she does, she'll wonder why you're so cranky. When a man gets wound up, the only thing that will make him happy is dropping his Huey in the lady's LZ. It's not immaturity or selfishness; it's biology. Women, on the other hand, can get all hot and then wander off and watch Oprah, with no ill effects.

Steve H.

But assuming God is real and all that, I do understand why He would not want gay sex going on on his planet. It has to do with a fundamental difference between men and women. Men really, really, really, really like sex, and women don't. They think they do, but that's because they've never spent ten minutes inside a male brain. If they could, they'd realize the female sex drive is like the male nipple. Vestigial compared to the opposite-sex counterpart.

A woman can go all day without thinking about sex. It's not rare for women to have almost no interest in sex at all. If a man goes ten minutes without thinking about sex, he needs to visit a doctor. I thought about sex during the SAT. I would probably think about sex at least once while skydiving. And for a man, that's normal.

Steve H.

The last thing Democrats care about is marital fidelity. They're the people who support unlimited abortion rights on the theory that it is physically impossible for a modern woman to keep random men from entering her vagina.

Steve H.

It's better to copulate than never.

Robert A. Heinlein

The second most preposterous notion is that copulation is inherently sinful.

Robert A. Heinlein

Everybody lies about sex.

Robert A. Heinlein

Sex should be friendly. Otherwise stick to mechanical toys; it's more sanitary.

Robert A. Heinlein

Never crowd youngsters about their private affairs sex especially. When they are growing up, they are nerve ends all over, and resent (quite properly) any invasion of their privacy. Oh, sure, they'll make mistakes but that's their business, not yours (you made your own mistakes, did you not?).

Robert A. Heinlein

Masturbation is cheap, clean, convenient, and free of any possibility of wrongdoing and you don't have to come home in the cold. But it's lonely.

Robert A. Heinlein

Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes. There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy.

Henry Kissinger

Call them "eagles," as does Andrew Sullivan, or call them anti-idiotarians, or just call them the post-9/11 voices who were quickest to sense the realignment of the political landscape — however you define this new political demographic, one of their characteristics is an indifference to other people's healthy expressions of their sexuality. Ah, but one man's "healthy" is another man's trip to the Vault to have his skin peeled off and doused with lighter fluid, right? No. There's a consensus on this. No kids; that's evil. No housepets; that's sick. No putting on a furry suit and rolling around a bed full of Beanie Babies; that's pathetic. It's the difference between something that might conceivable include a kink and something that is continually defined by the kink.

James Lileks

A promiscuous person is someone who is getting more sex than you are.

Victor Lownes

Whoever called it necking was a poor judge of anatomy

Groucho Marx

Throughout history females have picked providers for mates. Males pick anything.

Margaret Mead

At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakeable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.

H.L. Mencken

Any sex relation is bound to be full of peril, if only because it is a situation in which people lose their heads and act on instinct. Every such situation is full of hazards, no matter how much poetry may embellish it or logic justify it.

H.L. Mencken

Adultery is the application of Democracy to love.

H.L. Mencken

I remember when safe sex was a padded headboard.

Bob Monkhouse

As I grow old and older
and totter towards the tomb
I find that I care less and less
who sleeps with whom.

Dorothy Parker

If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

Dorothy Parker

If you're bashful, you'll never have children.

Yiddish Proverb

Sex is an expression of self-esteem . . . and a celebration of existance.

Ayn Rand

Sex with a real woman trumps porn, but porn trumps women who dangle sex in front of men and don't deliver. Again, this has nothing to do with enlightenment, and whether the dangling is a deliberate tease, a product of inhibition, or simple ineptness at the courtship dance doesn't matter much either. The most relevant causal fact is that young men get erections a lot, and when they get erections, having an orgasm tends to move to the top of the to-do list and stay there.

Eric S. Raymond

I'm deeply suspicious, frankly, of people who assume that all sex outside marriage is somehow depraved or corrupt or instrumental. Perhaps they are projecting, or perhaps they are just ignorant. It certainly seems to me [. . .] that sex is to some on the right what violence is to some on the left: something seen as so dangerous, and so powerful, that if it is not kept entirely in check, it is sure to go completely out of control. I regard both kinds of thinking as misguided.

Glenn Reynolds

Sex: Something that children never discuss in the presence of their elders.

Arthur S. Roche

Lord, give me chastity — but not yet.

Saint Augustine

Infants love the person who feeds them. We consider it a sign of maturity when children learn to love the food that relieves their hunger, rather than the person who cooks or serves it. In adults, we reverse these judgments. Men and women are expected to love those who satisfy their sexual hunger. And we consider it a sign of immaturity if they love not their sexual partners but only their partner's erotic attributes.

Thomas Szasz

Sexual desire may be a powerful impetus for bonding in animals but is an enormous barrier to comfortable relations among human beings. The reason is that sexual desire is rarely exactly reciprocal between two persons: as a rule, either the man lusts more passionately after the woman than she does for him, or less willing, partner; nor does anyone want to be lusted after, and be the 'sex object' of, a more lusting partner. This may be the main reason why sexual attraction and desire cannot serve as the foundation for marriage or lasting friendship.

Thomas Szasz

Why is the sexual arousal of women more interesting (even for women) than the arousal and release of men? Because the process is visually not so obvious, leaving more to the imagination, which is the ultimate source of sexual curiosity. This should tell people something about the connection between sex and secrecy, but they do not want to hear what it is.

Thomas Szasz

One can teach a person to eat dietetically proper meals, but one cannot teach him to be a gourmet. Similarly, one can teach a person to perform sexually, but one cannot teach him to be erotic.

Thomas Szasz

Sex therapist: Pimp and procurer with clinical credentials.

Thomas Szasz

Masturbation: 1. Taking matters into one's own hands, which is why authorities either prohibit or prescribe it (in an effort to maintain control over the individual). 2. The primary sexual activity of mankind; in the nineteenth century, a disease; in the twentieth, a cure.

Thomas Szasz

Orgasm is the quintessential paradox and, perhaps because of it, the quintessential pleasure in the entire range of human experience. This is because orgasm is the controlled experience of loss of control. If the loss of control over sexual arousal and response is overcontrolled, or if the control under which the loss is experienced is inadequate, the orgastic experience is impaired or absent. Conversely, the more unrestrained is the loss of control and the more secure the control under which it is lost, the greater is the intensity of the orgiastic experience. In short, the pleasure of genital orgasm is the consequence of a well-articulated experience of controlled loss of control. This is why, in human societies, sex is both a brutalizing and a civilizing force.

Thomas Szasz

Perversion: Sexual practice disapproved of by the speaker.

Thomas Szasz

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.

Evelyn Waugh

. . . but by the time that Adam went to dress she had climbed down enough to admit that perhaps love was a thing one could grow to be fond of after a time, like smoking a pipe.

Evelyn Waugh

Good sex is like good Bridge. If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand.

Mae West

And then there's the redneck factor. Get off the interstates and for every ten miles you drive it seems you go 10 years back in time. For these people, equality of the sexes means there's enough women for each guy to have one.

Jason McClanahan

A short cut is the longest distance between two points.

Anonymous

The only sin is self-hatred.

Paul Williams

Singapore: Disneyland with the death penalty.

William Gibson

The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them.
Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters, 1857

George Fitzhugh

If we ain't fighting fer slavery I'd like to know what we're fighting fer.

Nathan Bedford Forrest

If A can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B, why may not B snatch the same argument, even prove equally, that he may enslave A? You say A is white and B is black—is it color then, the lighter having the right to enslave the darker? Take care—by this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superior of the blacks, and therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again—by this rule you are to be the slave of the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.

Abraham Lincoln

I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.

H.L. Mencken

Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

Oscar Wilde

As I laid in the dark downstairs at 5:50 AM I remembered how once I scoffed at sleep, regarded it as a bothersome imposition. Sleep was for the weak. Sleep was for incurious dullards. In a way I still feel this way; a friend once noted I'm the only person he knows who actually manages to live the way he did in college and still make a decent living. Staying up late still seems like the best perk of adulthood. I've always regarded the world as divided into two warring camps: the House of Night and the House of Morning. (I have tolerance for people who belong to the latter, of course. Mine is a religion of peaceful coexistance.)

James Lileks

I'm told I snore, as well, but it's not the sort of plaster-loosening roars that make wives stare at the ceiling fan and consider murder most foul. It's a muted skonx of tolerable duration. I recall being woken by my father's snoring, which sounded like someone feeding wet trees to a walrus. Then came short little hopping snores, then silence, then The Snore of Agony that makes you wonder if he's sucked in the watch on the nightstand.

Sorry, Dad, but it had to be said.

Well, no, it didn't, but it's too late now.

James Lileks

The first time I saw Casablanca was on the big screen — the musty old Varsity in Dinkytown. I knew that those unfiltered nails put Bogie in the pine box. And I couldn't wait to get outside afterwards and fire one up. Why? Well, because I was addicted; duh. But smoking in 1983 wasn't yet the sign of moral turpitude; smokers were not entirely a pariah class. Nowadays, shopping malls post signs that say smoking is prohibited within 125 feet of the entrance, as though second-hand smoke is the same as Ebola. In 1983, smoking was stupid, but it wasn't evil.

My point is not to defend smoking. Kids! Don't smoke. It costs a lot, it makes you smell like you washed your hair in industrial solvent, and after a while you cough up things that look like oysters from Venus. I gave up cigarettes, and I'm glad, because I don't get winded getting out of bed anymore.

James Lileks

I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind — and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.

Ayn Rand

[T]obacco smokers today are being treated the way black people were treated 75 years ago. It is nothing short of barbaric to force them to huddle out in the rain and snow. And in many cities they're not even allowed to do that any more. It's even worse to tell the owner of a restaurant what to do with his own property with regard to smoking or anything else.

L. Neil Smith

Grapeshot (n): An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the demands of American Socialism.

Ambrose Bierce

[The] best thing about being a socialist is that you never have to grow up. It's the Peter Pandemic of the left.

Fred Boness

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.

Winston S. Churchill

Because public housing is subsidized, many desire it. Traditionally, city councils as landlords have been reluctant to evict their tenants, no matter what their behavior is or if they fail to pay their rent, in part to draw attention to the ideological difference between the public and the private sectors, to the gain of the former. Unlike the hardhearted, exploitative private landlord struggling for private advantage, the city council landlord benevolently provides a social service. Thus a public housing tenancy is to psychopaths what tenure is to academics: no better invitation to irresponsibility could possibly be imagined.

Theodore Dalrymple

The children who know how to think for themselves, spoil the harmony of the collective society that is coming, where everyone [would be] interdependent.

John Dewey

Independent self-reliant people [would be] a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future . . . [where] people will be defined by their associations.

John Dewey

In the ideal socialist state power will not attract power freaks. People who make decisions will show no slightest bias towards their own interests. There will be no way for a clever man to bend the institutions to serve his own ends. And the rivers will run uphill.

David Friedman

Your America is doing many things in the economic field which we found out caused us so much trouble. You are trying to control people's lives. And no country can do that part way. I tried it and failed. Nor can any country do it all the way either. I tried that, too, and it failed.

Herman Goering

Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. . . . The average American (should be) content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.

William T. Harris

They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?

Paul Harvey

The creation of socialism requires the curtailment of the central economic freedom of bourgeois society, namely, the right of individuals to own, and therefore to withhold if they wish, the means of production, including their own labor. [. . .] The full preservation of this bourgeois freedom would place the attainment of socialism at the mercy of property owners who could threaten to deny their services to society, and again, I refer to their labor, not just their material resources, if their terms are not met.

Robert Heilbrenner

Of what importance is all that, if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the Party, is supreme over them regardless of whether they are owners or workers. All that is unessential; our socialism goes far deeper. It establishes a relationship of the individual to the State, the national community. Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.

Adolf Hitler

SOCIALISM: Abort, Ignore, Fail, Retry?

Tom Isenberg

Free-market countries have always permitted "true socialists" to start their own factories and farms to demonstrate the superiority of socialist principles. So where's the evidence?

Tom Isenberg

In the unplanned economy, it's dog eat dog. In the planned one, both of them starve to death..

Richard J. Needham

I'm a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the American principle that you shouldn't stick your nose in other people's business except to make a buck.

P.J. O'Rourke

Socialism maintained that we shouldn't take all the money away from all the people since all the people don't have money. We should take all the money away from only the people who make money.

P.J. O'Rourke

To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze.

P.J. O'Rourke

Socialism is only workable in heaven, where they don't need it, and in hell, where they've already got it.

Cecil Palmer

Socialism, a doctrine born in Europe, struck very deep roots. The collective takes priority over the individual. The European social contract amounts to this: We will not let the talented rise too high, and we will not let the lazy fall too low. "Equality" doesn't mean equal opportunities, but equal limitations.

Ralph Peters

The new Left would demand everyone walk on crutches to make the crippled more comfortable with their handicap.

Ayn Rand

Authoritarian socialism has failed almost everywhere, but you will find not a single Marxist who will say it has failed because it was wrong or impractical. He will say it has failed because nobody went far enough with it. So failure never proves that a myth is wrong.

Jean-Francois Revel

I also began to wonder where the left gets its harshness — a know-it-all style of dark grievance-dom that has increasingly come to define the peace movement. It was on my mind because I had seen this belief system in full bloom two nights earlier, as I watched a replay of the day's big Washington, D.C., antiwar demonstration. . . .

I just wish that every gathering of my lefties didn't have to become such a tedious exercise in cause-linking, chant-bullhorning and supposed truth-telling. I have the fantasy of a progressive cause with no Youth and Student Coordinator, no West Coast Representative, no brother from the movement in the country to the south and no presumption that words like Solidarity, Network, Action and Uprising are always to be treated as gospel, the code words that say we are all the same.

Paul Scott

The truth is that these stunted creatures simply hate to see anybody enjoying any aspect of his life — usually because they have no lives themselves, or what lives they do have are a misery and they want company. And too, they understand too well that an individual who enjoys his life is far more difficult to control, something they just can't abide. As the late Alan Sherman pointed out in his masterpiece, The Rape of the Ape, that's why religions made sex a no-no. Anybody who's getting laid regularly is impossible to control.

L. Neil Smith

The last time anyone left of Hubert Humphrey had a new idea was somewhere back around the year that Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein.

L. Neil Smith

[T]he notion of principle seems beyond the intellectual reach of most lefties. For decades, the "virtues" of "flexibility" and compromise have been drummed into them, until they're as ideologically watertight as a screen door in a submarine. If you involve yourself with them in some coalition effort, you have to watch your back all the time, either because they're stupid or perfidious — a stand on principle and a regard for the truth being outmoded "bourgeois" values to them.

L. Neil Smith

What is politically defined as economic "planning" is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by government officials.

Thomas Sowell

The proverb warns, "You should not bite the hand that feeds you." But maybe you should if it prevents you from feeding yourself.

Thomas Szasz

Tell it like it is: only the state can buy the things that make people happiest.

Polly Toynbee

In any society where the State is the sole employer, opposition means death by slow starvation. Who does not obey, shall not eat.

Leon Trotsky

I have always been made sad when I have heard members of any race claiming rights and privileges, or certain badges of distinction, on the ground simply that they were members of this or that race, regardless of their own individual worth or attainments.

Booker T. Washington

All Marxists, basically, are reactionaries, yearning for the Oriental despotisms of pre-Hellenic times, the neolithic culture that preceded the rise of self-consciousness and egoism.

Robert Anton Wilson

Private faces in public places are wiser and nicer than public faces in private places.

W.H. Auden

Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.

John Gardner

It is not possible to experiment with a society and just drop the experiment whenever we choose. The experiment enters into the life of the society and never can be got out again.

William Graham Sumner

Mar. 2, 2003: Goodnight, Pioneer 10. The first spacecraft to leave the solar system has fallen silent after 31 years. First spacecraft to the asteroid belt; first to Jupiter. It was a nice little robot with a picture on the side: a map of our solar system, and a picture of a man and a woman. Here's where we live! And we're naked! It was like the first swingers personal ad ever placed in the universal classified.

James Lileks

You may have trouble getting permission to aero or lithobrake asteroids on Earth.

James D. Nicoll

Permanent human presence on the Moon: great. Big NASA project that NASA will screw up: not so great. Likelihood of getting the latter: high. Likelihood of getting the former: Not as high. Likelihood of getting the latter without the former actually coming about: highest.

To NASA: Sorry. I love you guys. But that's the track record since, oh, sometime before I hit puberty. Or maybe before I learned to walk. Or maybe before I was born . . .

Glenn Reynolds

Victor Koman was dead right, when he said (in Kings of the High Frontier) that the actual mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — its not-so-hidden agenda, having nothing to do with the development of space travel and exploration — is to keep scum like you and me from ever getting into space.

At the same time (as Victor also points out), NASA mouthpieces have been telling the public since the 1960s that our being able to visit space, perhaps even vacationing on the Moon, or in zero gravity at a space station, was "only about thirty years away". That's what they said in the 60s, that's what they said in the 70s, that's what they said in the 80s, that's what they said in the 90s, and that's what they're still saying today. It's always just about thirty years away.

L. Neil Smith

What [NASA] taught us (unless you actually care about fruitfly reproduction in microgravity) was that the only individuals who would ever be allowed to get into space were precisely the kind of government-approved jockstraps who were on the varsity football team when you were in high school — oh yes, and an occasional cheerleader — oops, make that public school teacher.

L. Neil Smith

Spanish is essentially a dialect of Californian English used for increasing the value of real estate. (Gee, wouldn't this faux Spanish strip mall be worth $200,000 more if it was called Plaza del Mucho Dinero?)

Jeffrey Henning

Spanish is essentially Italian spoken by Arabs.

B. Philip Jonsson

The declared portion of the Spanish Civil War lasted from 1936 to 1939. It has passed into legend among Western leftists as a heroic struggle between the Communist-backed Republican government and Nazi-backed Franco, one that the good guys lost. The truth seems rather darker; the war was fought by two collections of squabbling, atrocity-prone factions, each backed by one of the two most evil totalitarianisms in human history. They intrigued, massacred, wrecked, and looted fairly indiscriminately until one side collapsed from exhaustion. Franco was the last man left standing.

Franco had no aspirations to conquer or reinvent the world, or to found a dynasty. His greatest achievements were the things that didn't happen. He prevented the Stalinist coup that would certainly have followed a Republican victory. He then kept Spain out of World War II against heavy German pressure to join the Axis.

Eric S. Raymond

"The specialist system fails from a personal point of view because a person who can only do one thing can do virtually nothing for himself," writes the farmer-essayist Wendell Berry, whose agrarian ideas are popular among both greens and traditionalists. No one, of course, truly "can do only one thing, " but Berry explains by example: "In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists." The alternative to specialization is the great reactionary dream: a return to peasant life.

Virginia Postrel

I decided to take up jai alai. Really. I took a lesson at a place in Miami called American Amateur Jai Alai, operated by the American Jai Alai Foundation, a group dedicated to keeping this ancient sport alive, which is not easy because the object is to kill your opponent.

OK, that's a slight exaggeration. But jai alai (which gets its name from the word "jai" and the word "alai") IS the world's fastest ball game, and it can be dangerous. It was invented centuries ago by the Basques, a fascinating people whose unique language apparently has no words for "You're going to put somebody's eye out!"

The Basques played with a rock, but in modern jai alai the players use a "pelota," which is Spanish for "a ball that is even harder than a rock." Players use a "cesta," or curved basket, to throw the pelota against a "wall," or wall, at speeds that can exceed 180 m.p.h., and when the ball comes whizzing back, the opposing player must try, using anticipation, skill and timing, to maintain control of his sphincter. At least that was my goal.

Dave Barry

Baseball: Almost the only place in life where a sacrifice is really appreciated.

Mark Beltaire

Football — A game for gentlemen played by hooligans.
Rugby — A game for hooligans played by gentlemen.

Jon Clarke

It's not about beating the other guy, it's about having fun . . . But nothing is more fun than beating the other guy.

Marc Crawford

It seems to me that individual sports are the only sports worth watching. Figure skaters don't rape anyone. No one gets death threats when a boxing match is disrupted by a fan with a load on. There's something about the team mentality that turns men into monkeys. Somehow, ordinary men get the crazy idea that the team's identity in some way extends to them. And it simply does not. In reality, it barely extends to the players. They go where the money is. All over the country, there are schmoes who will root for a particular team until they die. But the players themselves flush their loyalties at the opening of a checkbook.

Steve H.

It's disgusting how passionate fans get over team sports. They buy cute little jerseys and paint their man-boobies in team colors and pay spoiled creeps to sign baseballs, and they really feel like they're part of their towns' teams. Meanwhile, the players have no idea who they are and wouldn't care if they all died. That's pathetic. And what do we worship these clowns for? Hitting balls with sticks. Putting balls through hoops. Meanwhile, people who do important, useful things for a living go ignored. I don't see anyone paying disabled veterans to sign baseballs. No medicine fan ever painted "Jonas Salk" on his tits and got carted away for punching a Sabin fan.

Steve H.

Ah, the ropes. I can still recall how my bowels would loosen when Mr. Dick, the PE instructor, got out the ropes and poles. First he'd put down a mat, which was as thin as the Saturday paper; then he'd attach the pole to a hook in the ceiling. (It struck me as particularly cruel and evil of the school to build the ceiling with these hooks in place — you realized that they'd been planning this all along. The fiends.) Going up a rope was impossible for me; it was like trying to juggle water. I just looked like someone trying to keep an albino python from ascending into heaven. The pole was worse, though, because I could climb it. I just didn't know how to unclimb it, so the trip back down was a skin-searing ride I remember not for the pain as much as the smell. Varnish, skin, fear: a potent cologne.

James Lileks

I wasn't the fat kid of the class, but Mom bought my pants in the "husky" size. Add to my lardy blobbyness a lack of coordination, and you have the classic Chubby Spaz. I passed gym class only in the sense that a bird passes a seed.

James Lileks

[M]y arms felt as a tired as a loan shark enforcer whose clients all bet on the Vikings.

James Lileks

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

H.L. Mencken

I fear we may both be suffering from what I call the "Bob Cunis" problem — with roughly the same number of readers of both papers seemingly pro and anti the war. Cunis was the New Zealand fast bowler whose performance one day at Lord's was so mediocre that it prompted commentator John Arlott to observe: "Cunis's bowling this morning has been rather like his surname . . . neither one thing nor the other."

Piers Morgan

Cockfighting has always been my idea of a great sport — two armed entrées battling to see who'll be dinner.

P.J. O'Rourke

Everything on a boat has a different name than it would have if it weren't on a boat. Either this is ancient seafaring tradition or it's how people who mess around with boats try to impress the rest of us who actually finished college.

P.J. O'Rourke

Fishing . . . is a sport invented by insects and you are the bait.

P.J. O'Rourke

The America's Cup is like driving your Lamborghini to the Grand Prix track to watch the charter buses race.

P.J. O'Rourke

Golf: A plague invented by the Calvinistic Scots as a punishment for man's sins.

James Reston

If you're going to make every game a matter of life in death, you're going to have problems. For one thing, you'll be dead a lot.

Dean Smith

[T]he British dominated the tennis scene [in 1877], thanks to their grueling training regime: On the day of the big match, a chap would take the train up to London, drop in at the Savoy for a haunch of venison and some spotted dick washed down with a couple of stiff ones, toddle down to Wimbledon, change into the heavy underwear and a thick long-sleeved pullover, and dispatch Johnny Foreigner in three sets. Unfortunately, the Americans and Australians then introduced radical concepts like getting up early in the morning and practising.

Mark Steyn

Wimbledon in June is, to invert Rupert Brooke, a corner of an English field that is forever foreign: on Centre Court, a surly Yank is whacking aces at a charmless Czech; across the languid haze of a perfect English summer afternoon (54 and light drizzle) drifts the sound of simulated female orgasm from the two grunting Brazilian nymphettes on Court Number 1; far away on Court Number 73, a British player is being knocked out in straight sets by a 12-year-old midget from the South Sandwich Islands; and, as if by clockwork, the air is suddenly rent by the traditional cry of "You cannot be serious, man!", as John McEnroe finds the strawberry tent expects him to pay £29.95 a punnet ("includes two to four actual strawberries and use of complimentary serving utensil").

Mark Steyn

If we lived every day with our emotions as raw as they get in sports, we'd be dead in a week.

John Jeremiah Sullivan

The rules of soccer are simple. If it moves kick it. If it doesn't move kick it until it does.

Peter Woosnam

The quickest way to end production of a certain item is to adopt that as your standard.

Dan L. Merkel

Standards are all too often tools of control and not tools of value.

Andrew Plato

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.

Andrew Tanenbaum

Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state.

Aristotle

The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else. The State can return no more to the people than it has taken from them. It is utterly impossible for it to confer a specific benefit upon some of the individuals who make up the community without inflicting a greater injury upon the community as a whole.

Frederic Bastiat

War is the health of the state.

Randolph Bourne

We can foresee a time when . . . the only people at liberty will be prison guards who will then have to lock up one another. When only one remains, he will be called the "Supreme Guard" and that will be the ideal society in which problems of opposition, the headache of all twentieth century governments, will be settled once and for all.

Albert Camus

Let's face it, in the great 20th-century struggle between the state and the individual, the state has won, game, set, and match.

John Derbyshire

Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism.

Aldous Huxley

It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.

Justice Robert H. Jackson

For years, the right wing blathered on about the nanny state. But how they love the nanny when she changes sex, slips on a uniform and comes for undesirable elements in the night.

Heather Mallick

We all have an obligation to serve our government.

Robert S. McNamara

The evil growth of the more absurd forms of nationalism during the past century is probably largely due to the spread of free education. When the pedagogue becomes a public functionary his natural puerility and timidity are increased, and he is a docile propagandist of any doctrine enunciated by the politicians.

H.L. Mencken

This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority. A variety of inhibitions against disobeying authority come into play and successfully keep the person in his place.

Dr. Stanley Milgram

This may illustrate a dangerously typical situation in complex society: it is psychologically easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of evil action but is far from the final consequences of the action. Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but to participate in mass murder he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers. At the same time the man in the camp who actually dropped Cyclon-B into the gas chambers was able to justify _his_ behavior on the grounds that he was only following orders from above. Thus there is a fragmentation of the total human act; no one man decides to carry out the evil act and is confronted with its consequences. The person who assumes full responsibility for the act has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society.

Dr. Stanley Milgram

Political control is effected through action. The attitudes of the guards at a concentration camp are of no consequence when in fact they are allowing the slaughter of innocent men to take place before them. Similarly, so-called "intellectual resistance" in occupied Europe — in which persons by a twist of thought felt that they had defied the invader — was merely indulgence in a consoling psychological mechanism. Tyrannies are perpetuated by diffident men who do not possess the courage to act out their beliefs. Time and again in the experiment people disvalued what they were doing but could not muster the inner resources to translate their values into action.

Dr. Stanley Milgram

The most common adjustment of thought in the obedient subject is for him to see himself as not responsible for his own actions. He divests himself of responsibility by attributing all initiative to the experimenter, a legitimate authority. He sees himself not as a person acting in a morally accountable way but as the agent of external authority. In the postexperimental interview, when subjects were asked why they had gone on, a typical reply was: "I wouldn't have done it by myself. I was just doing what I was told." Unable to defy the authority of the experimenter, they attribute all responsibility to him. It is the old story of "just doing one's duty" that was heard time and time again in the defense statements of those accused at Nuremberg. But it would be wrong to think of it as a thin alibi concocted for the occasion. Rather, it is a fundamental mode of thinking for a great many people once they are locked into a subordinate position in a structure of authority. The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

Dr. Stanley Milgram

Whatever the State saith is a lie; whatever it hath is a theft: all is counterfeit in it, the gnawing, sanguinary, insatiate monster.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything the state says is a lie; everything it has, it has stolen.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people."

Friedrich Nietzsche

Communists, Nazis, and more than a few democratically elected leaders of the free world have told us in plain language that their loathsome acts were justified by felicific calculus — the most good for the greatest number.

P.J. O'Rourke

To talk of states as if they were persons, endowed with the spiritual impulses and aspirations of human beings, and therefore morally accountable, is a piece of pure abstraction for which not even Hegel can be held responsible. It is a habit of modern journalism, catering to that mixture of vulgar passion and dominant materialism which renders unto Caesar the things that are God's because Caesar can be bribed.

W.A. Orton

If you are looking for an easy war, fight an information-controlling state. If you are looking for a difficult investment, invest in an information-controlling state. If you are hunting a difficult conflict, enter the civil strife that arises after the collapse of an information-controlling state. If you are looking for a good investment, find an emerging or "redeemed" state unafraid of science, hard numbers, and education.

Ralph Peters

Although we may not know it, we have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.

Thomas Szasz

Statistics are like mini-skirts in that they may give you some good ideas, but they don't show you the most important things.

Anonymous

Statistics can be used to support anything, especially statisticians.

Anonymous

One of the major drawbacks of the collection of information is the human temptation to use it, and in some cases, to misuse it.

Anonymous

The Statistical Rule-of-Thumb: If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.

Anonymous

The Laws of Statistics:

You never use statistics when you know what you're talking about.
No amount of computation will convert uncertainty to certainty.
Correlation is the weakest form of functional association, not the strongest.
You got a better idea?
Any treatment improves the worst.
If it ain't statistically significant it ain't nothing.
No matter how you slice 'em, they're still statistics.

William E. Drissel

The odds of dying from an asteroid impact are roughly equal to the odds of dying in a plane crash: 1 in 20,000. The odds of winning the Powerball lottery are 1 in 54 million. Meaning: if you ever win the Powerball, and you get on a plane that's hit by an asteroid, the odds of you making the cover of Statistician Monthly are 1:1.

James Lileks

All things are the same, except for the differences, and different except for the similarities.

Thomas Sowell

Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster.

Thomas Sowell

Most variables can show either an upward trend or a downard trend, depending on the base year chosen.

Thomas Sowell

Improbable events are commonplace in a country with more than a quarter of a billion people.

Thomas Sowell

If you want to catch something, running after it isn't always the best way.

Lois McMaster Bujold

"The key of strategy, little Vor," she explained kindly, "is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to a victory. Ideally. Your death has one use; your success another. . ."

Lois McMaster Bujold

The fastest growth industry is undertaking: The disposal of the dead. But the second fastest growth industry is strategic analysis. These military metaphysicians . . . don't like generals mucking about . . . They don't like talking to people who have to do it, because sometimes their feet are invited back to earth, and that's a very uncomfortable posture for a military metaphysician.

General Sir John Hackett

Always mystify, mislead and surprise the enemy if possible.

Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson

Everything in strategy is very simple; but that does not mean that everything is very easy

Karl von Clauswitz

If you entrench yourself behind strong fortifications, you compel the enemy to seek a solution elsewhere.

Karl von Clauswitz

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

Friedrich Nietzsche

O! it is excellent
To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.

William Shakespeare

The longer a man is wrong, the surer he is that he's right.

Anonymous

Imbecility (n): A kind of divine inspiration, or sacred fire affecting censorious critics of this dictionary.

Ambrose Bierce

Against Stupidity, even the gods themselves struggle in vain.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.

Robert A. Heinlein

Stupidity cannot be cured with money or through education or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without mercy.

Robert A. Heinlein

Nature abhors a moron.

H.L. Mencken

Any kind of handicap save one may be overcome by a resolute spirit — blindness, crippling, poverty. The history of humanity is a history of just such overcomings. But no spirit can ever overcome that handicap of stupidity. The person who believes what is palpably not true is hopeless.

H.L. Mencken

1st Law of Morons: They are impervious to logic, reason, or persuasion.

2nd Law of Morons: They have endless reserves of energy to defend their idiocy.

3rd Law of Morons: They have well developed sense of self greatness.

Knowing this, the only way to effectively combat those of the Moron persuasion is through indirect means. If you attack a Moron directly, they will wear you down with their tremendous powers of illogic and diversion. Nothing can crack the impenetrable shell of stupidity that Morons wield with deft aptitude. Their stupidity is not only impenetrable, it can be a potent offensive weapon. They can infect others around them with deep, penetrating stupidity. Eventually, everybody in their vicinity is a drooling mass of crap, demanding rights they don't deserve and complaining about offshoring and the inadequacy of font selection committees.

Andrew Plato

Stupidity is the only known inexhaustible natural resource.

Nicholas Russon

The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.

Thomas Szasz

Stupidity is the norm of the universe.

Frank Zappa

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.

Matthew Arnold

There is no medal better than being acclaimed for your style.

Johan Cruyff

In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

Oscar Wilde

Baldrick, you wouldn't see a subtle plan if it painted itself purple and danced naked on top of a harpsichord singing "Subtle Plans Are Here Again".

Edmund Black Adder

No one ever attains very eminent success by simply doing what is required of him; it is the amount and excellence of what is over and above the required, that determines the greatness of ultimate distinction.

Charles Kendall Adams

If one does not begin with the right attitude, there is little hope for a right ending.

Anonymous

Learn from the mistakes of others: you can never live long enough to make them all yourself.

Anonymous

If going the right way doesn't get you anywhere, try going the wrong way.

Anonymous

Many of life's failures are men who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Anonymous

Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill.

Anonymous

The only alternative to perseverance is failure.

Anonymous

A successful baseball player gets a hit only once out of every three tries.

Anonymous

Success has ruined many a good man.

Anonymous

Success is a matter of luck; just ask any failure.

Anonymous

Success isn't where you got to, but how far.

Anonymous

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Aristotle

Success (n): The one unpardonable sin against one's fellows.

Ambrose Bierce

If you can't do what you want, do what you can.

Lois McMaster Bujold

The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.

Benjamin Disraeli

The path to success is paved with good intentions that were carried out.

Robert C. Edwards

The only thrill worthwhile is the one that comes from making something out of yourself.

William Feather

How to Succeed: Try hard enough.
How to Fail: Try too hard.

Malcolm Forbes

It is understandable that those who fail should incline to blame the world for their failure. The remarkable thing is that the successful, too, however much they pride themselves on their foresight, fortitude, thrift, and other "sterling qualities", are at bottom convinced that their success is a fortuitous combination of circumstances. The self-confidence of even the consistently successful is never absolute. They are never sure that they know all the ingredients which go into the making of their success. The outside world seems to them a precariously balanced mechanism, and so long as it ticks in their favour they are afraid to tinker with it. Thus the resistance to change and the ardent desire for it spring from the same conviction, and the one can be as vehement as the other.

Eric Hoffer

I do the best I know how, the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing it to the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me will not amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Abraham Lincoln

The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.

Vince Lombardi

The spirit, the will to win, and the will to excel are the things that endure. These qualities are so much more important than the events that occur.

Vince Lombardi

Winning isn't everything: it's the only thing.

Vince Lombardi

You have greatly laboured, but so does everyone who would greatly win.

Lord Byron

In my early days as a salesman in Canada, I learned that success is just one step ahead of failure.

Lord Thomson of Fleet

What is success in this world? I would say it consists of four simple things — to live a lot, to love a lot, to laugh a lot, and from it all, to learn a lot.

Richard J. Needham

There are many people, particularly in sports who think that success and excellence are the same thing and they are not the same thing. Excellence is something that is lasting and dependable and largely within a person's control. In contrast, success is perishable and is often outside our control. If you strive for excellence, you will probably be successful eventually . . . people who put excellence in first place have the patience to end up with success. An additional burden for the victim of the success mentality is that he/she is threatened by success of others and resents real excellence. In contrast, the person fascinated by quality is excited when he/she sees it in others.

Joe Paterno

What you conceive and believe, you achieve.

Gerry Patterson

Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.

General George S. Patton

Behind every successful man, there is a surprised woman.

Maryon Pearson

Success breeds arrogance and incompetence.

H. Ross Perot

Its easier to act like you knew what you were doing after its all said and done.

Andrew Plato

Crux-of-the-Issue Theory (aka Theory of Relevance): Resist the temptation to be side-tracked by peripheral issues that cannot yield a payoff, no matter what their outcome. Concentrate on the crux of every issue the point upon which success or failure rests.

Robert J. Ringer

Intimidation Theory: The results a person obtains in any given situation are inversely proportionate to the degree to which he is intimidated.

Robert J. Ringer

Leapfrog Theory: The quickest way to the top is not by fighting your way through the pack; the quickest way is to leapfrog over the pack. All you need is the ability and knowledge necessary to play the game on a higher level, plus the courage to stake your claim to your rightful place on the ladder.

Robert J. Ringer

Positive-/ Negative-Result Theory: Formula for failure: Try thirty-seven times. Formula for success: Try thirty-eight times.

Robert J. Ringer

Salvage Theory: On bad days, instead of taking the attitude that you may as well give up because you've already blown half the day, learn to cut your losses short and salvage what's left of the day. Anyone can do well on good days; only successful people make headway on the bad ones.

Robert J. Ringer

Timing Theory: Conditions are never right at the right time; the timing is always wrong! If you're waiting for everything to be just right before taking action, you are in possession of a foolproof excuse for failure.

Robert J. Ringer

To-Do-It-Over-Again Theory: If only you had to do it over again, you would do it differently. Fine — then get started, because you do have the opportunity to do it over again, if you just have the courage to admit it to yourself.

Robert J. Ringer

Waiting-to-be-Discovered Theory: Getting discovered only happens in cheap novels and "B" movies. Credentialled or not, there's more to success than just showing up and letting the world know that you're ready to be discovered. The public doesn't owe you a living, and, rest assured, it is very much aware of that fact.

Robert J. Ringer

Concentration Theory: Success is directly dependent upon the total number of hours one can devote to intense, uninterrupted concentration.

Robert J. Ringer

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.

Vidal Sassoon

The difference between failure and success is doing a thing nearly right and doing a thing exactly right.

Edward Simmons

What you are must always displease you, if you would attain to that which you are not.

St. Augustine

Success is a rare paint, hides all the ugliness.

John Suckling

There is no use in your walking five miles to fish when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful near home.

Mark Twain

All glory comes from daring to begin.

Eugene F. Ware

It is better to aim at perfection and miss than it is to aim at imperfection and hit it. . . . Better to do something even the wrong thing than to do nothing at all. . . . The men who set out to do what others say cannot be done are the ones who make the discoveries, produce the inventions, and move the world ahead.

Thomas J. Watson

Wealth, notoriety, place, and power are no measure of success whatever. The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we have been on one hand, and the thing we have made and the thing we have made off ourselves on the other.

H.G. Wells

Anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature — it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist — to sympathize with a friend's success.

Oscar Wilde

In the ideology and jargon of psychiatry and law, a severely mentally ill person is considered to be, ipso facto, "dangerous to himself and others". Like the metaphor of mental illness, this nonsensical phrase is used to justify involuntary psychiatric incarceration and "treatment", and is thus pivotal to the psychiatric enterprise.

While it makes sense to say that a person is dangerous to others, it makes no sense to say that he is dangerous to himself (unless we assume, a priori, that he has two selves, one sane and another insane, the latter being dangerous to the former). But the person who wants to die differs from the person who wants to get rich only in his goal. Either or both of these person might be said to be "dangerous to himself", the phrase simply disguising that the speaker considers the actor's motives illegitimate.

Thomas Szasz

Suicide is to homicide as masturbation is to rape. Perhaps if killing oneself were called "auto-homicide", and killing others "hetero-homicide", the distinction between these acts would be more precise, and our understanding of them more profound.

Thomas Szasz

Some people believe that a person should have a right to kill himself: namely, that the intention (or alleged intention) to commit suicide should not be punishable by either the criminal or the mental hygiene law.

Others believe that a person should have a right to euthanasia: namely, that a physician, under certain circumstances, should be able to kill a person, unrestrained by the criminal law.

I support the right to suicide, but not the right to euthanasia. However, I believe there is a right more fundamental than either — namely, the right to self-medication. Thus, the right, say, of a cancer patient, to take Laetrile or any other "quack medicine" seems to me more elementary than his rights to suicide or euthanasia. Yet this is the right physicians are the most eager to deny to patients.

Thomas Szasz

On the radio and television, in books, magazines and newspapers, we are incessantly shown how, and told to, kill others, but are never shown how, or told to, kill ourselves. Clearly, we are attracted to homicide and love to hear how to do it, but are repelled by suicide and don't want to hear how to do it. What this tells us about ourselves I leave to the reader to decide.

Thomas Szasz

Suicide: The only (literal) escape from a life sentence. (Death by accident or illness is not willed, and hence doesn't count.)

Thomas Szasz

Living well requires careful planning and unrelenting vigilance in making decisions. Since dying is part of living, how can we expect dying well to require anything less? To be sure, the phrase "dying well", like the phrase "living well", has no more meaning than we give it and we must be candid, especially with ourselves, about what we intend it to mean. To persons who value the vita activa, living well — besides being the best revenge — means being self-determining and self-reliant. Both childhood and old age are, in such a view, disabilities, because they entail a diminution of our capacity for independent, self-directed action.

Thomas Szasz

The person who engages in behavior psychiatrists call a "suicidal gesture" or a "suicidal threat" offends not because he (allegedly) wants to die, which is his inalienable right, but because he involves the public in what ought to be a private act. His offense, in short, is similar to that of the exhibitionist. Every man has an inalienable right to his penis, but no man has a right to exhibit it in public. Similarly, every man has an inalienable right to his intention to kill himself, but no man has the right to impose it on the public. The person who exhibits his intention to kill himself is indiscreet and indecorous, not insane.

Thomas Szasz

To prohibit what one cannot enforce is to degrade both authority and obedience, thus undermining respect for both law and decency. To prohibit suicide is thus the ultimate folly, and the ultimate indecency.

Thomas Szasz

Today, if a person says — especially to a mental health practitioner — "I am going to kill myself", the listener takes it for granted that it is his moral and professional duty to try to prevent the speaker from killing himself. This is, prima facie, a very odd way to respond to such a statement. Suppose a person were to say, "I will start smoking two packs of cigarettes a day . . . "; or "I will go on a diet of egg yolks, ice cream and french fries . . . "; or "I will go shopping and spend more money than I can afford . . ."; or any other similar statement implying that he will embark on self-injurious behavior that may, sooner or later, harm or kill him. Would we feel it is our duty to talk him out of doing so? To treat him for a mental illness? To forcibly restrain him in order to prevent his carrying out the promised action? If the answer is no with respect to smoking, overeating and overspending, why is it, why should it be, yes to suicide? If Jones doesn't want to stay married, or live in the United States, or do any number of other things, we do not consider it Smith's business, much less his duty, to try to keep Jones married, or live in America. If, then, Jones doesn't want to go on living, why should it be Smith's business to keep him alive? What is there about being a physician (especially a psychiatrist) that gives him the right, much less the duty, to prevent a "suicidal person" from killing himself?

Like marriage or being an American, life is a privilege, an opportunity and a burden — in various proportions at various times, but always in the eyes of the beholder. Our current customs, laws and psychiatric practices with respect to suicide and suicide prevention reflect not our respect for life (as we like to pretend), but merely our fear of death.

Thomas Szasz

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.

Francis Bacon

When the human race has once acquired a superstition nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it.

Mark Twain

And this is most damning: plesiosaurs were air-breathing. Why is it that the best evidence for the Loch Ness Monster is a distant, grainy video of an "unexplained" wake, shot in the far distance. This creature has to come up for air several times an hour. If we grant that there is a breeding population of aquatic dinosaurs surviving in Loch Ness, they should be sticking their heads out of the water like a giant whack-a-mole game, 24/7. If air-breathing dinosaurs really inhabited these lakes in Europe, and Africa and the US, then the best evidence would be the body hauled ashore by a shotgun-toting British Marine after Nessie ate a busload of tourists in full view of the world press.

Bill Whittle

The moment there is suspicion about a person's motives, everything he does becomes tainted.

Mohandas K. Gandhi

There's no such thing as "sustainable" development. Human progress and individual liberty have advanced on the backs of one unsustainable development after another: When we needed trees for heating and transportation, we chopped 'em down. Then we discovered oil, and the trees grew back. When the oil runs out, we won't notice because our SUVs will be powered by something else. Bet on human ingenuity every time. We're not animals, and it's a cult as deranged as the screwiest fringe religion to insist we are. Earth's most valuable resource is us.

Mark Steyn

In 1914, Bernard Shaw caused a sensation by giving Eliza Doolittle the words "Not bloody likely!" to utter on the London stage. Of course, the sensation that this now-innocuous, even innocent exclamation created depended wholly for its effect upon the convention that it flouted: but those who were outraged by it (and who have generally been regarded as ridiculous in subsequent accounts of the incident) instinctively understood that sensation doesn't strike in the same place twice, and that anyone wanting to create an equivalent in the future would have to go far beyond "Not bloody likely." A logic and a convention of convention-breaking was established, so that within a few decades it was difficult to produce any sensation at all except by the most extreme means.

Theodore Dalrymple

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.

Mark Twain

Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are actually the same language. It's just that the Norwegians can't spell it, and the Danes can't pronounce it.

Chlewey

Swedish is what happened when a Nordic-speaking people got angry at all the other Nordic-speaking peoples and decided to deliberately alter their language to make it look more German.

Peter Ravn Rassmussen

This place sucks. Switzerland, I mean.

The famed Swiss mania for cleanliness must have migrated indoors, because Zurich is a pigsty. A friend of mine once told me that Chicago is a cleaner city than Zurich (she was married to a Swiss banker at the time), and I laughed it off, thinking she was just being gracious.

Chicago is ten times cleaner than Zurich.

Kim du Toit