Signature Sayings
We have a word for our enlarged capacity to postpone the acknowledgment of error: we call it "planning." -- Martin Mayer, "Today and Tomorrow in America" (1976)
You may be young only once, but you can be immature your whole life.
Education replaces cocksure ignorance with thoughtful uncertainty.
"Government has never been the answer unless it's a really screwball question." Daniel J Mitchell, senior fellow, The Heritage Foundation
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," Yossarian observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.
There are only two industries that refer to their customers as "users". -- Edward Tufte
The world is divided into people who do things, and people who get the credit.
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history -- with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. -- Mitch Ratcliffe, Technology Review, April 1992
A panelist on "Think Tank" once described Washington, DC as "a place holding all the answers".
"A)bort, R)etry, I)nfluence with large hammer."
"An object at rest cannot be stopped." -- The Tick
"One never knows, do one?" -- Fats Waller
Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss!
Always remember to pillage before you burn.
Two heads are more numerous than one.
Never take investment advice from someone who's working. -- B.C., Johnny Hart, 3/20/97
"People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is putting up with all the idiots in the world." -- Calvin
The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time... the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time.
If you can't get your work done in the first 24 hours, work nights.
Don't be irreplaceable; if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a damned fool about it.
Everything can be filed under "miscellaneous."
If you are good, you will be assigned all the work. If you are really good, you will get out of it.
People don't make the same mistake twice -- they make it three times, four times, or five times.
Getting the job done is no excuse for not following the rules.
Following the rules will not get the job done.
When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more easily by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?" [Note: In government they usually ask, "How would Clint Eastwood handle this?" It never helps get the job done any faster, but it's very comforting to think about all those corpses.... ;-)]
"I don't think I'll get married again. I'll just find a woman I don't like and give her a house." -- Lewis Grizzard
To define recursion, we must first define recursion.
"There are three types of people in this world... those who can count and those who can't."
Today's subliminal thought is:
"I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter." -- Nicholas Petreley, Sr. Editor, InfoWorld
The media are less a window on reality than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions. -- Paul Weaver, "Selling the Story", New York Times, July 29, 1994
To count is a modern practice, the ancient method was to guess. -- Dr. Johnson
This [controversy], alas, confirms the rule that human beings are often less interested in reliable information than in its possible repercussions on their beliefs and cravings. -- Jean-Francois Revel, "The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information"
"Obstacles to sound scrutiny do not spring so much from the mind's being devoid of science as from its being full of prejudices." -- Pierre Boyle, 17th century Frenchman
"The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless." -- Sebastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort
"The mere act of drinking beer in an attempt to measure your tolerance is likely to affect your impression of how many beers you've drunk." -- The Heineken Uncertainty Principle.
Once ... in the wilds of Afghanistan I lost my corkscrew, and we were forced to live on nothing but food and water for days. -- W. C. Fields, "My Little Chickadee"
"The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made." -- Groucho Marx
"Have you ever been beaten half to death with wooden rakes?"
"No, but I did sit through 'The English Patient' once." -- "Vengeance Unlimited"
2 + 2 = 5 for large values of 2.
24 hours in a day ... 24 beers in a case ... coincidence?
All my money goes for child support... INNER child support.
"Did you know that dolphins are so intelligent that within only a few weeks of captivity, they can train Americans to stand at the very edge of the pool and throw them fish?"
"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them, well... I have others." - Groucho Marx
Philosophy 101: If a man speaks in the woods, and a woman is not there to hear him, is he still wrong?
If at first you don't succeed, see if the loser gets anything.
"In Manhattan, traffic lights are not a rule, just a suggestion." -- David Letterman
Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a refund from the IRS, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Robert Heinlein ("Logic of Empire", 1941)
Never make anything simple and efficient when a way can be found to make it complex and wonderful.
It is a scientifically proven fact that not wearing socks helps people think in hexadecimal.
"Si tu veux jouer au plus con, c'est pas toi qui va gagner." (If the game is to see who can be the biggest fool, don't count on winning.)
Real Users find the one combination of bizarre input values that shuts down the system for days.
Silence is not only golden, it's rarely misquoted.
The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill. -- Robert Heller
The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate. -- Doug Engelbart
The universe clearly operates for the benefit of humanity. This can be seen from the convenient way the sun comes up in the morning, when people are ready to start the day. -- T. Pratchett, "Hogfather"
There are only two theories about why one should argue with women. Through thorough field-testing, I have determined that neither one works.
Thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as Gods. Cats have never forgotten this.
"It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them." -- Mark Twain
I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make when they go flying by.
"Alcohol and calculus don't mix. Never drink and derive."
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
A man is like a fine wine. He starts out raw as grapes, and it's a woman's job to stomp on him and keep him in the dark until he matures into something she'd like to have dinner with.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
It's all just 1's and 0's. You just have to get them in the right order.
This week's theme: words to drop into conversations with a therapist.
"A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: 'Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time.' When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, 'The one I feed the most.'" -- George Bernard Shaw
The next time some academics tell you how important "diversity" is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department. -- Thomas Sowell
"Never confuse information with knowledge."
"Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there." --- Douglas Adams
Definition of gun control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her pantyhose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound.
"Oh, sure, you can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!" -- Homer Simpson
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.
There was SOMETHING that I was going to do with my life... what WAS it?
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." -- Hunter S. Thompson
Thought for the day: When someone annoys you, it takes 42 muscles to frown; but it takes only 4 muscles to extend your arm and whack them in the head.
"The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people will be." -- Lao Tzu
"If you can't answer a man's argument, all is not lost... you can still call him vile names." -- Elbert Hubbard
But such is the nature of manias, that the more obscure the vision... the more delightful we can imagine it to be. It is a little like the difference between meeting a woman by candlelight... and seeing her the next day at the beach. The first meeting requires imagination. It is the bull market phase. The second is the correction and usually requires gin and tonic.
Sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking, which leads to a career in education. -- DMN
"Information wants to be beer... or something like that." -- Anon.
"All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for us to think through even a small fraction of the topics that we come across." -- Julian Simon
"One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations." -- Eric Hoffer
"When watching men of power in action it must be always kept in mind that, whether they know it or not, their main purpose is the elimination or neutralization of the independent individual -- the independent voter, consumer, worker, owner, thinker -- and that every device they employ aims at turning men into a manipulable 'animated instrument' which is Aristotle's definition of a slave." -- Eric Hoffer
"The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic." -- H.L. Mencken
"To complain of lack of leadership is, in the field of political affairs, the characteristic attitude of all harbingers of dictatorship." -- Ludwig von Mises
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. -- Rene Descartes
"Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough." -- Jack Nicholson to John Huston in "Chinatown"
"Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?" -- Mark Twain, "Huckleberry Finn"
An individual's reality model can be right or wrong, complete or incomplete. As a rule it will be both incomplete and wrong, and one would do well to keep that probability in mind. -- Dietrich Dörner, "The Logic of Failure"
"All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out." -- Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises
"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us." -- "Calvin and Hobbes" (Bill Watterson)
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." -- Hunter S. Thompson
"We usually see only the things we are looking for--so much so that we sometimes see them where they are not." -- Eric Hoffer
"Because we can expect future generations to be richer than we are, no matter what we do about resources, asking us to refrain from using resources now so that future generations can have them later is like asking the poor to make gifts to the rich." -- Julian Simon
The faster you run before slamming into the wall, the more fun you'll have on the way and the better looking the nurse will be when you wake up.
"Necessity is seldom the mother of invention. Rather, true inventions beget necessities." -- Nobel laureate Arthur Kornberg
Democracy: Three wolves and a sheep vote on what to have for dinner.
"In America, anyone can become President. That's one of the risks we take." -- attributed to Adlai Stevenson
"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them, well... I have others." -- Groucho Marx
It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. -- Adam Smith
Economics, over the years, has become more and more abstract and divorced from events in the real world. Economists, by and large, do not study the workings of the actual economic system. They theorize about it. As Ely Devons, an English economist, once said at a meeting, "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn't go and look at horses. They'd sit in their studies and say to themselves, 'What would I do if I were a horse?'" -- Ronald H Coase, "The Task of the Society"
"All models are wrong, but some are useful." -- George Box
"There are three classes of people who don't think markets work; the Cubans, the North Koreans and active money managers." -- Rex Sinquefield, co-author of a compendium of past stock returns
Ubi dubium ibi libertas
Where there is doubt, there is freedom -- Latin proverb
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." -- Douglas Adams
"The only way to do better than somebody else, or more importantly than the market, is to have a way of interpreting data that is different from other people's." -- Bill Miller, Legg Mason Value Trust
The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. -- Paul Johnson
Dear Lord...
So far today I am doing all right. I have not gossiped, lost my temper, been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or over-indulgent. However, I am going to get out of bed in a few minutes, and I will need a lot more help after that.
Amen.
"The idea that we cannot build a desirable social order like a mosaic, by selecting whatever particular parts we like best, and that many well-intentioned measures may have a long train of unforeseeable and undesirable consequences, seems to be intolerable to modern man." -- F.A. Hayek
If voting could change things, it would be illegal.
"If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?" -- T.H. Huxley (novelist Aldous Huxley's grandfather)
Unified Theory of Greed (UTG) -- the insight that we're all greedy SOBs, but the real SOB is the guy whose greed--whether for power, money, or love--is not held in check by his wife, the market, or the law.
"He who is not aware of his ignorance will be only misled by his knowledge." -- Richard Whatley
"Words must be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking." -- John Maynard Keynes
"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." -- Thomas Sowell
"The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people, lacking that gift, are forced to face reality." -- Thomas Sowell
"The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all... The Common Good Before the Individual Good." -- National Socialist Party 1920 platform
"We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice." -- Dr. Samuel Johnson, 1781, prior to the opening the bid of an auction over which he presided
"Reality very rarely exceeds the square root of expectations." -- Ray Devoe
Date created: July 17, 1997
Last modified: May 9, 2001
Copyright © 1997, Greg Cramer, O.M.S.
Maintained by: Greg Cramer
optionsms@earthlink.net
