I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradictions to the sentiments
of others, and all positive assertion of my own.  I even forbade myself the use
of every word or expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion, such
as "certainly", "undoubtedly", etc.  I adopted instead of them "I conceive",
"I apprehend", or "I imagine" a thing to be so or so; or "so it appears to me
at present".
	When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied
myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing him
immediately some absurdity in his proposition.  In answering I began by
observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right,
but in the present case there appeared or seemed to me some difference, etc.
	I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the
conversations I engaged in went on more pleasantly.  The modest way in which I
proposed my opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction.
I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily
prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I
happened to be in the right.
		-- Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

	I managed to say, "Sorry," and no more.  I knew that he disliked
me to cry.
	This time he said, watching me, "On some occasions it is better
to weep."
	I put my head down on the table and sobbed, "If only she could come
back; I would be nice."
	Francis said, "You gave her great pleasure always."
	"Oh, not enough."
	"Nobody can give anybody enough."
	"Not ever?"
	"No, not ever.  But one must go on trying."
	"And doesn't one ever value people until they are gone?"
	"Rarely," said Francis.  I went on weeping; I saw how little I had
valued him; how little I had valued anything that was mine.
		-- Pamela Frankau, "The Duchess and the Smugs"

	I paid a visit to my local precinct in Greenwich Village and
asked a sergeant to show me some rape statistics.  He politely obliged.
That month there had been thirty-five rape complaints, an advance of ten
over the same month for the previous year.  The precinct had made two
arrests.
	"Not a very impressive record," I offered.
	"Don't worry about it," the sergeant assured me.  "You know what
these complaints represent?"
	"What do they represent?" I asked.
	"Prostitutes who didn't get their money," he said firmly,
closing the book.
		-- Susan Brownmiller, "Against Our Will"

	[I plan] to see, hear, touch, and destroy everything in my path,
including beets, rutabagas, and most random vegetables, but excluding yams,
as I am absolutely terrified of yams...
	Actually, I think my fear of yams began in my early youth, when many
of my young comrades pelted me with same for singing songs of far-off lands
and deep blue seas in a language closely resembling that of the common sow.
My psychosis was further impressed into my soul as I reached adolescence,
when, while skipping through a field of yams, light-heartedly tossing flowers
into the stratosphere, a great yam-picking machine tore through the fields,
pursuing me to the edge of the great plantation, where I escaped by diving
into a great ditch filled with a mixture of water and pig manure, which may
explain my tendency to scream, "Here come the Martians!  Hide the eggs!" every
time I have pork.  But I digress.  The fact remains that I cannot rationally
deal with yams, and pigs are terrible conversationalists.

	"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess; "and the moral of
that is -- `Be what you would seem to be' -- or, if you'd like it put
more simply -- `Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it
might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not
otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be
otherwise.'"
		-- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865)

	I said, "Preacher, give me strength for round 5."
	He said, "What you need is to grow up, son."
	I said, "Growin' up leads to growin' old, And then to dying, and
to me that don't sound like much fun.
		-- John Cougar, "The Authority Song"

	"I suppose you expect me to talk."
	"No, Mr. Bond.  I expect you to die."
		-- Goldfinger

	"I think he said 'Blessed are the cheesemakers.'"
	"Nonsense, he was obviously referring to all manufacturers of
dairy products."
		-- The Life of Brian

	"I thought you were trying to get into shape."
	"I am. The shape I've selected is a triangle."

	If I kiss you, that is a psychological interaction.
	On the other hand, if I hit you over the head with a brick,
that is also a psychological interaction.
	The difference is that one is friendly and the other is not
so friendly.
	The crucial point is if you can tell which is which.
		-- Dolph Sharp, "I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot"

	If the tao is great, then the operating system is great.  If the
operating system is great, then the compiler is great.  If the compiler
is great, then the application is great.  If the application is great, then
the user is pleased and there is harmony in the world.
	The tao gave birth to machine language.  Machine language gave birth
to the assembler.
	The assembler gave birth to the compiler.  Now there are ten thousand
languages.
	Each language has its purpose, however humble.  Each language
expresses the yin and yang of software.  Each language has its place within
the tao.
	But do not program in Cobol or Fortran if you can help it.

	If you do your best the rest of the way, that takes care of
everything. When we get to October 2, we'll add up the wins, and then
we'll either all go into the playoffs, or we'll all go home and play golf.
	Both those things sound pretty good to me.
		-- Sparky Anderson

	If you rap your knuckles against a window jamb or door, if you
brush your leg against a bed or desk, if you catch your foot in a curled-
up corner of a rug, or strike a toe against a desk or chair, go back and
repeat the sequence.
	You will find yourself surprised how far off course you were to
hit that window jamb, that door, that chair.  Get back on course and do it
again.  How can you pilot a spacecraft if you can't find your way around
your own apartment?
		-- William S. Burroughs

	If you're like most homeowners, you're afraid that many repairs
around your home are too difficult to tackle.  So, when your furnace
explodes, you call in a so-called professional to fix it.  The
"professional" arrives in a truck with lettering on the sides and
deposits a large quantity of tools and two assistants who spend the
better part of the week in your basement whacking objects at random
with heavy wrenches, after which the "professional" returns and gives
you a bill for slightly more money than it would cost you to run a
successful campaign for the U.S. Senate.
	And that's why you've decided to start doing things yourself.
You figure, "If those guys can fix my furnace, then so can I.  How
difficult can it be?"
	Very difficult.  In fact, most home projects are impossible,
which is why you should do them yourself.  There is no point in paying
other people to screw things up when you can easily screw them up
yourself for far less money.  This article can help you.
		-- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"

	"I'll tell you what I know, then," he decided.  "The pin I'm wearing
means I'm a member of the IA.  That's Inamorati Anonymous.  An inamorato is
somebody in love.  That's the worst addiction of all."
	"Somebody is about to fall in love," Oedipa said, "you go sit with
them, or something?"
	"Right.  The whole idea is to get where you don't need it.  I was
lucky.  I kicked it young.  But there are sixty-year-old men, believe it or
not, and women even older, who might wake up in the night screaming."
	"You hold meetings, then, like the AA?"
	"No, of course not.  You get a phone number, an answering service
you can call.  Nobody knows anybody else's name; just the number in case
it gets so bad you can't handle it alone.  We're isolates, Arnold.  Meetings
would destroy the whole point of it."
		-- Thomas Pynchon, "The Crying of Lot 49"

	"I'm looking for adventure, excitement, beautiful women," cried the
young man to his father as he prepared to leave home.  "Don't try to stop me.
I'm on my way."
	"Who's trying to stop you?" shouted the father.  "Take me along!"

	I'm sure that VMS is completely documented, I just haven't found the
right manual yet.  I've been working my way through the manuals in the document
library and I'm half way through the second cabinet, (3 shelves to go), so I
should find what I'm looking for by mid May.  I hope I can remember what it
was by the time I find it.
	I had this idea for a new horror film, "VMS Manuals from Hell" or maybe
"The Paper Chase: IBM vs. DEC".  It's based on Hitchcock's "The Birds", except
that it's centered around a programmer who is attacked by a swarm of binder
pages with an index number and the single line "This page intentionally left
blank."
		-- Alex Crain

	"I'm terribly sorry, sir," the novice barber apologized, after
badly nicking a customer.  "Let me wrap your head in a towel."
	"That's all right," said the customer.  "I'll just take it home
under my arm."

	In a forest a fox bumps into a little rabbit, and says, "Hi,
Junior, what are you up to?"
	"I'm writing a dissertation on how rabbits eat foxes," said the
rabbit.
	"Come now, friend rabbit, you know that's impossible!  No one
will publish such rubbish!"
	"Well, follow me and I'll show you."
	They both go into the rabbit's dwelling and after a while the
rabbit emerges with a satisfied expression on his face.  Comes along a
wolf.  "Hello, little buddy, what are we doing these days?"
	"I'm writing the 2'nd chapter of my thesis, on how rabbits devour
wolves."
	"Are you crazy?  Where's your academic honesty?"
	"Come with me and I'll show you."
	As before, the rabbit comes out with a satisfied look on his face
and a diploma in his paw.  Finally, the camera pans into the rabbit's cave
and, as everybody should have guessed by now, we see a mean-looking, huge
lion, sitting, picking his teeth and belching, next to some furry, bloody
remnants of the wolf and the fox.

	The moral: It's not the contents of your thesis that are
important -- it's your PhD advisor that really counts.

	In "King Henry VI, Part II," Shakespeare has Dick Butcher suggest to
his fellow anti-establishment rabble-rousers, "The first thing we do, let's
kill all the lawyers."  That action may be extreme but a similar sentiment
was expressed by Thomas K. Connellan, president of The Management Group, Inc.
Speaking to business executives in Chicago and quoted in Automotive News,
Connellan attributed a measure of America's falling productivity to an excess
of attorneys and accountants, and a dearth of production experts.  Lawyers
and accountants "do not make the economic pie any bigger; they only figure
out how the pie gets divided.  Neither profession provides any added value
to product."
	According to Connellan, the highly productive Japanese society has
10 lawyers and 30 accountants per 100,000 population.  The U.S. has 200
lawyers and 700 accountants.  This suggests that "the U.S. proportion of
pie-bakers and pie-dividers is way out of whack."  Could Dick Butcher have
been an efficiency expert?
		-- Motor Trend, May 1983