%%
With his appearance came
the brightening of the spaces with light,
and with the brightening of the spaces
the great mist-clouds were thickened together and fell,
whereby was evolved water in water:
yea, and the world-holding sea.

Zuni Creation Myth
%%
All the rivers run into the sea,
yet the sea is not full;
to the place from which the rivers come,
there they return again.

Ecclesiastes 1:7
%%
The greatest of men or the highest good
Is like water,
Nurturing everything, contending with nothing;
Dwelling in the humble and lowly places.
Nothing beneath the Heavens is more gentle and yielding than Water
Yet it is unsurpassed in overcoming the strong and the hard.

--Lao-tzu, 6th century BC/Tao Te Ching
%%
Apache Water Song

Waters are coming down (To the desert)
Beautiful, Beautiful Water
Flowing, Bringing Life!
Waters are coming down (To the desert)
Life Giving Water--Beautiful!

"Hiyo Witzeh Niyoh", Translation by Franc Menusan
%%
"There is almost always a waterway nearby in American life that
nourishes and binds communities together. It is the very last thing a
thinking people should pollute or pointlessly obstruct. The average
person is two thirds river water and ought to have more sense about
these things than he has shown." --Tom McGuane
%%
"The urinals at O'Hare are smarter than most personal computers because
they notice when you walk away." --Nicholas Negroponte
%%
"It is wisdom which is seeking for wisdom." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the
expert's there are few." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"Zazen practice is the direct expression of our true nature. Strictly
speaking, for a human being, there is no other practice than this prac-
tice; there is no other way of life than this way of life." --Shunryu
Suzuki
%%
"These forms are not the means of obtaining the right state of mind. To
take this posture is itself to have the right state of mind. There is no
need to obtain some special state of mind." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"What we call `I' is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and
when we exhale." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to
control him." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"Because we enjoy all aspects of life as an unfolding of big mind, we
do not care for any excessive joy. So we have imperturbable composure."
--Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"You should rather be grateful for the weeds you have in your mind,
because eventually they will enrich your practice." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"In the zazen posture, your mind and body have great power to accept
things as they are, whether agreeable or disagreeable." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"To stop your mind does not mean to stop the activities of mind. It
means your mind pervades your whole body. With your full mind you form
the mudra in your hands." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"Bowing is a very serious practice. You should be prepared to bow, even
in your last moment. Even though it is impossible to get rid of our
self-centered desires, we have to do it. Our true nature wants us to."
--Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"If you continue this simple practice every day, you will obtain some
wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but
after you attain it, it is nothing special." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"The point we emphasize is strong confidence in our original nature."
--Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"Even if the sun were to rise from the west, the Bodhisattva has only
one way." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"If you lose the spirit of repetition, your practice will become quite
difficult." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual
everyday routine." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"If your practice is good, you may become proud of it. What you do is
good, but something more is added to it. Pride is extra. Right effort is
to get rid of something extra." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good
bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"`To give is non-attachment,' that is, just not to attach to anything is
to give." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"It is when your practice is rather greedy that you become discouraged
with it. So you should be grateful that you have a sign or warning
signal to show you the weak point in your practice." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"Usually when someone believes in a particular religion, his attitude
becomes more and more a sharp angle pointing away from himself. In our
way the point of the angle is always towards ourselves." --Shunryu
Suzuki
%%
"To have some deep feeling about Buddhism is not the point; we just
do what we should do, like eating supper and going to bed. This is
Buddhism." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"When you become you, Zen becomes Zen. When you are you, you see things
as they are, and you become one with your surroundings." --Shunryu
Suzuki
%%
"People who know the state of emptiness will always be able to dissolve
their problems by constancy." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"Without any intentional, fancy way of adjusting yourself, to express
yourself as you are is the most important thing." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"Big mind is something to express, not something to figure out. Big mind
is something you have, not something to seek for." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we
have no fear of death any more, nor actual difficulty in our life."
--Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"Our understanding of Buddhism is not just an intellectual understand-
ing. True understanding is actual practice itself." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"If you are trying to attain enlightenment, you are creating and being
driven by karma, and you are wasting your time on your black cushion."
--Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"We should find perfect existence through imperfect existence."
--Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"When you do something, if you fix your mind on the activity with some
confidence, the quality of your state of mind is the activity itself.
When you are concentrated on the quality of your being, you are prepared
for the activity." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"Moment after moment, everyone comes out from nothingness. This is the
true joy of life." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"When you study Buddhism you should have a general house cleaning of
your mind." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"It is the readiness of the mind that is wisdom." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"In our everyday life our thinking is ninety-nine percent self-centered.
`Why do I have suffering? Why do I have trouble?'" --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"That we are attached to some beauty is also Buddha's activity."
--Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"For Zen students a weed is a treasure." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"There is something blasphemous in talking about how Buddhism is per-
fect as a philosophy or teaching without knowing what it actually is."
--Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"Actually, we are not the Soto school at all. We are just Buddhists. We
are not even Zen Buddhists. If we understand this point, we are truly
Buddhists." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"To realize pure mind in your delusion is practice. If you try to expel
the delusion it will only persist the more. Just say, `Oh, this is just
delusion,' and do not be bothered by it." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"If you take pride in your attainment or become discouraged because of
your idealistic effort, your practice will confine you by a thick wall."
--Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"Before the rain stops we can hear a bird. Even under the heavy snow we
see snowdrops and some new growth." --Shunryu Suzuki
%%
"Only the most foolish of mice would hide in a cat's ear. But only the
wisest of cats would think to look there." --Scott Love
%%
"Make it a practice to keep on the lookout for novel and interesting
ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original
only in its adaptation to the problem you are working on." --Thomas
Edison
%%
"I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not
understand. Why shells existed on the tops of mountains along with the
imprints of coral and plants and seaweed usually found in the sea. Why
the thunder lasts a longer time than that which causes it and why im-
mediately on its creation the lightning becomes visible to the eye while
thunder requires time to travel. How the various circles of water form
around the spot which has been struck by a stone and why a bird sustains
itself in the air. These questions and other strange phenomena engaged
my thought throughout my life." --Leonardo da Vinci
%%
"The art of becoming wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."
--William James
%%
"I'd rather know some of the questions than all of the answers." --James
Thurber
%%
"The best way to get a good idea is to get many ideas." --Linus Pauling
%%
"Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you
have." --Emile' Chartier
%%
"If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not
to be reached by search or trial." --Heraclitus
%%
"I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by
looking up something and finding something else on the way." --Franklin
Adams
%%
"My advice to any young person at the beginning of their career is
to try to look for the mere outlines of big things with their fresh,
untrained, and unprejudiced mind." --Hans Selye
%%
    Three Propositions

1.  Software engineering is like looking for a black cat in a dark room.
2.  Systems engineering is like looking for a black cat in a dark room
    in which there is no cat.
3.  Knowledge engineering is like looking for a black cat in a dark room
    where there is no cat and someone yells, "I got it!"

    --from a bulletin board at Syntelligence Corporation, quoted by
    Brock Brower
%%
    Big Al Juodikis's Rules of Life

o   If Jack's in love, he's no judge of Jill's beauty.
o   Too much of the world is run on the theory that you don't need road
    manners if you are a five-ton truck.
o   It is difficult to see the picture when you are inside the frame.
o   One meets his destiny often in the road he takes to avoid it.
o   When it comes to helping you, some people stop at nothing.
o   After learning the tricks of the trade, many of us think we know the
    trade.
o   One of these days is none of these days.
o   We hear and apprehend only what we already know.
o   Life is like playing a violin solo and learning the instrument as
    one goes on.
o   The dog that trots about finds a bone.
o   The man who waits for things to turn up has his eyes on his toes.
%%
    Tom Hirshfield's Rules of Thumb

o   If you hit every time the target's too near.
o   Never learn details before deciding on a first approach.
o   Never state a problem to yourself in the same terms as it was
    brought to you.
o   The second assault on the same problem should come from a totally
    different direction.
o   If you don't understand a problem, then explain it to an audience
    and listen to yourself.
o   Don't mind approaches that transform one problem into another,
    that's a new chance.
o   If it's surprising it's useful.
o   Studying the inverse problem always helps.
o   Spend a proportion of your time analyzing your work methods.
%%
"People who are only good with hammers see every problem as a nail."
--Abraham Maslow
%%
"Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a
yellow spot into the sun." --Pablo Picasso
%%
"The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a
different kind of artist." --Eric Gill
%%
"All art, and most knowledge, entails either seeing connections or
making them. Until it is hooked up with what you already know, nothing
can ever be learned or assimilated." --Ralph Caplan
%%
"If you don't ask `Why this?' often enough, somebody will ask `why
you?'" --Tom Hirshfield
%%
"Slaying sacred cows makes great steaks." --Dick Nicolosi
%%
"Creative thinking may simply mean the realization that there's no
particular virtue in doing things the way they have always been done."
--Rudolph Flesch
%%
"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not. A
sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is." --Horace
Walpole
%%
Q: What do you call a clairvoyant midget who just broke out of prison?
A: A small medium at large.
%%
"Beet ever so onion there snow peas legume." --Margaret Thornley
%%
"I don't like to eat snails. I prefer fast food." --Strange de Jim
%%
"There are some things so serious that you have to laugh at them."
--Niels Bohr
%%
"Learn to pause... or nothing worthwhile will catch up to you." --Doug
King
%%
"I never try to solve a problem by trying to solve it." --Rick Tendy
%%
"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist after
he grows up." --Pablo Picasso
%%
"Play is what I do for a living; the work comes in evaluating the
results of the play." --Mac MacDougall
%%
"The human mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a
strange protein and resists it with a similar energy." --W.I. Beveridge
%%
"A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for."
--Grace Hopper
%%
"There's as much risk in doing nothing as in doing something."
--Trammell Crow
%%
"No one ever achieved greatness by playing it safe." --Harry Gray
%%
"I wish I'd drunk more champagne." --last words of John Maynard Keynes
%%
"If you're not failing every now and again it's a sign that you're not
trying anything very innovative." --Woody Allen
%%
"A man's errors are his portals of discovery." --James Joyce
%%
"An inventor is simply a person who doesn't take his education too
seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he
graduates from college he has to take three or four examinations a year.
If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing.
He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. If he succeeds once then he's
in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the
biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail in-
telligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to
keep trying and failing until he learns what will work." --Charles
Kettering
%%
"Never forget that the greatest idea at the wrong time is a loser. If
you look at the `firsts' that were really seconds, they had timing in
their favor. As with real estate, it's location, location, location;
with ideas, it's timing, timing, timing." --Robert Gelber
%%
"It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of
what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out-of-date."
--Roger von Oech
%%
"So much are the modes of excellence settled by time and place that men
may be heard boasting in one street of that which they would anxiously
conceal in another." --Dr. Johnson
%%
Some people have built-in filters that screen out the boos and amplify
the hurrahs. Those are the people who never know when they're in
trouble." --Tommy Davis
%%
"If you spend too much time warming up, you'll miss the race. If you
don't warm up at all, you may not finish the race." --Grant Heidrich
%%
"Don't let your search for the great idea blind you to the merely good
or promising idea. Often that's all the warrior needs. If it's a great
idea so much the better. But if you reject everything except the very
best, you may leave your warrior with nothing to fight for." --Bob
Metcalfe
%%
"A lot of disappointed people have been left standing on the street
corner waiting for the bus marked `Perfection'". --Donald Kennedy
%%
"Try? There is no try. There is only do or not do." --Yoda
%%
"To put your ideas into action is the most difficult thing in the
world." --Goethe
%%
"The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a
warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes
everything as a blessing or a curse." --Carlos Castaneda
%%
"The ultimate inspiration is the deadline." --Steve Karmen
%%
"The fact that twice a year the creative talent of this country is
working until midnight to get something ready for a trade show is very
good for the economy. Without this kind of pressure, things would turn
to mashed potatoes." --Nolan Bushnell
%%
"If the creator had a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely
would have meant for us to stick it out." --Arthur Koestler
%%
"Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which
guarantees the others." --Aristotle
%%
"You can't hit a home run unless you step up to the plate. You can't
catch fish unless you put your line in the water. You can't reach your
goals if you don't try." --Kathy Seligman
%%
"To know and not to do is not to know." --saying on Wall Street
%%
"A thick skin is a gift from God." --Konrad Adenauer
%%
"If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." --Harry Truman
%%
"The only person who likes change is a wet baby." --Roy Blitzer
%%
"Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us."
--Hebrews 12:1
%%
"When down in the mouth, remember Jonah--he came out all right."
--Thomas Edison
%%
"Never give up, never give up, never ever give up." --Winston Churchill
%%
    Advice

o   Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
o   Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with
    talent.
o   Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
o   Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
o   Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
%%
"Whether you think you can or can't, you're right." --Henry Ford
%%
"Either you let your life slip away by not doing the things you want to
do, or you get up and do them." --Carl Ally
%%
"Getting ideas is like shaving: if you don't do it every day, you're a
bum." --Alex Kroll
%%
"The only truly happy people are children and the creative minority."
--Jean Caldwell
%%
"With the Desert Fathers you have the characteristic of a clean break
with a conventional, accepted social context in order to swim for one's
life into an apparently irrational void." --Thomas Merton
%%
"Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and
thinking something different." --Albert Szent-Gyo"rgyi
%%
"Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods." --Neil
Postman
%%
"The second assault on the same problem should come from a totally
different direction." --Tom Hirshfield
%%
"There are two kinds of people in this world: those who divide
everything into two groups, and those who don't." --Kenneth Boulding
%%
"The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man."
--Ortega y Gasset
%%
"Order is heav'n's first law." --Alexander Pope
%%
"Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction." --Pablo
Picasso
%%
"If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it
and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been
before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the
realm of magic." --Tom Robbins
%%
"As soon as you have made a thought, laugh at it." --Lao Tzu
%%
"It's not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the
important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness that
would do credit to any great scholar. But the monkey is serious because
he itches." --Laroff's credo
%%
"There is nothing so unthinkable as thought unless it be the entire
absence of thought." --Samuel Butler
%%
"Only the ephemeral is of lasting value." --Ionesco
%%
"The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between
the notes--ah, that is where the art resides." --Arthur Schnabel
%%
"There are two kinds of truth, small truth and great truth. You
can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood.
The opposite of a great truth is another great truth." --Niels Bohr
%%
"We can't leave the haphazard to chance." --N.F. Simpson
%%
"Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth." --Pablo Picasso
%%
"To those who are awake, there is one ordered universe, whereas in sleep
each person turns away from this world to one of his own." --Heraclitus
%%
"Everything flows." --Heraclitus
%%
"It is not possible to step into the same river twice." --Heraclitus
%%
"The way up and the way down are one and the same." --Heraclitus
%%
"It is not good for men to achieve all they wish." --Heraclitus
%%
"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child
at play." --Heraclitus
%%
"A man's character is his destiny." --Heraclitus
%%
"Lovers of wisdom must be inquirers into very many things indeed."
--Heraclitus
%%
"The nail that sticks up will be hammered down." --Japanese proverb
%%
"We all know your idea is crazy. The question is, whether it is crazy
enough." --Niels Bohr, to a colleague
%%
"If anyone among you thinks he is wise in this age, let him become a
fool that he may become wise." -I Corinthians iii, 18-19
%%
"You can't see the good ideas behind you by looking twice as hard at
what's in front of you." --Andrew Mercer
%%
"What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people
think things are." --Epictetus
%%
"Some people have ideas. A few carry them into the world of action and
make them happen. These are the innovators." --Andrew Mercer
%%
"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the hearts affections and
the truth of the imagination." --John Keats
%%
"Treasure friendship! There is nothing more beautiful on Earth. It is
a comfort in life. You have someone to whom you can open your mind, to
whom you can reveal your secrets, to whom you can entrust the hidden
things of your heart." --St. Ambrose
%%
"Love thrives on trivial kindnesses." --Theodor Fontane
%%
"Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, nor hours, days, months,
which are the rags of time." --John Donne
%%
"That is true love which always and for ever remains the same, whether
one grants it everything or denies it everything." --J.W. Goethe
%%
"Do you know what makes every cage vanish? Every serious, profound af-
fection, friendship, brotherliness love. All these open the cage with
overpowering magic. He who lacks that magic remains locked in death.
Wherever sympathy arises, life is born." --Vincent Van Gogh
%%
"A faithful friend is the medicine of life." --Ecclesiasticus, VI, 16
%%
"Then let thy love be younger than thyself, or thy affection cannot hold
the bent." --William Shakespeare
%%
"Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of
interchanging praise." --Oliver Wendell Holmes
%%
"Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted; If it enrich
not the heart of another, its waters, returning Back to their springs,
like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment." --Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow
%%
"In love, you must give three times before you take once." --Brazilian
proverb
%%
"Our aim is to recognise each other and for each one of us to learn to
see and honour in the other what he is--the counterpart and complement
of the other." --Hermann Hesse
%%
"Friendship redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves." --Francis
Bacon
%%
"From quiet homes and first beginning, Out to the discovered ends,
There's nothing worth the wear of winning, But laughter and the love of
friends." --Hilaire Belloc
%%
"Friendship between two persons depends upon the patience of one."
--Indian wisdom
%%
"We are not at home where our dwelling is, but where we are understood."
--Christian Morgenstern
%%
"To like and dislike the same things, that is indeed true friendship."
--Sallust
%%
"All love is sweet; Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its
familiar voice wearies not ever." --Shelley
%%
"Love has two daughters--kindness and patience." --Proverb
%%
"The hardest heart can be softened by tenderness, but, if you try to
smooth it down and polish it, it will glow like fire or freeze like
ice." --Chuang-Tse
%%
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for
his friends." --St. John's Gospel, XV, 3
%%
"Orthodoxy is the grave of intelligence." --Bertrand Russell
%%
"Love wouldn't be blind if the braille weren't so damned much fun."
--Armistead Maupin
%%
"A man's mind, stretched by a new idea, can never go back to its
original dimensions." --Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
%%
"The first track is the end of a string. At the far end, a being is
moving; a mystery, dropping a hint about itself every so many feet,
telling you more about itself until you can almost see it, even before
you come to it. The mystery reveals itself slowly, track by track, giv-
ing its genealogy early to coax you in. Further on, it will tell you the
intimate details of its life and work, until you know the maker of the
track like a lifelong friend." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"The mystery leaves itself like a trail of breadcrumbs, and by the time
your mind has eaten its way to the maker of the tracks, the mystery is
inside you, part of you forever. The tracks of every mystery you have
every swallowed move inside your own tracks, shading them slightly or
skewing them with nuances that show how much *more* you have become than
what you were." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"Tracks exist at the interface where the sky drags along the surface of
the earth." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"The place where you lose the trail is not necessarily the place where
it ends." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"A lost trail always extends beyond the evidence, and even the trails we
find are only fragments of the trails that lie beyond our comprehen-
sion." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"English is a bad language for certain kinds of words. It hasn't got
much for ideas like "wholeness of feeling". "Nature" is the best word
English can come up with to describe something as various yet as indi-
visible as the bond between all living things." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"The only language for some things is experience. Some experiences
simply do not translate. You have to *go* to *know*." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"You should never so focus your attention that you are not also aware of
the larger pattern around you." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"An omen is an insight that changes your way of seeing the world. It is
a landmark against which everything that follows or preceded it comes to
be measured." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"An omen is the shadow of the spirit-that-moves-in-all-things." --Tom
Brown, Jr.
%%
"Hate is just fear worn inside out." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"An omen is nature favoring us with a remarkable event, the glow from
which makes our life different for a while." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"An omen is an experience that interprets all events that follow it and
reinterprets everything that went before." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"Good medicine, bad medicine, and omens change our understanding of our
relationship to the world." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned clever-
ness from the crow, and courage from the jay, who will attack an owl
ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of
them ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit." --Tom
Brown, Jr.
%%
"There are better fliers; swallows have more grace and all the soar-
ing birds are more spectacular. But nobody flies with more reckless
abandon than the chickadee, and nobody flies with more delight."
--Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"The chickadee lives by joyous faith in living." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"The importance of a test is not the results but what you do with them."
--Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"A limitless commitment to learning is less important than knowing the
limits you have and what they are." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"Our training was a matter of defining our limits to ourselves as well
as a way of sharpening our skills." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"We learned two things from our tests, the limits of our power and the
limits of our will." --Tom Brown, Jr.
%%
"No bird soars too high, If he soars with his own wings."
--William Blake
%%
"Literature is news that stays news." --Ezra Pound
%%
"Rabbit's clever," said Pooh thoughtfully.
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit's clever."
"And he has Brain."
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain."
There was a long silence.
"I suppose," said Pooh, "that that's why he never understands anything."
--A.A. Milne
%%
"You can't learn anything from saguaro cactus, from ocotillo. They are
just passing through; their roots, their much heralded dormancy in the
dry season, these are only illusions of permanence. They know even less
than you do." --Barry Lopez
%%
"One faces the future with one's past." --Pearl S. Buck
%%
"One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach, one can only
collect a few." --Anne Morrow Lindbergh
%%
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." --Gandhi
%%
"Our reality is influenced by our notions about reality, regardless of
the nature of those notions." --Joseph Chilton Pearce
%%
"When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in
different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early
spring." --Farkas Bolyai
%%
"It's harder to solve people's problems than it is to design really neat
products." --Stewart Alsop
%%
The great path has no gates,
Thousands of roads enter it.
When one passes through this gateless gate
He walks freely between heaven and earth.
--Mumonkan
%%
"The great path has no gates; thousands of roads enter it. When one
passes through this gateless gate, he walks freely between heaven and
earth." --Mumonkan
%%
"Pictured food cannot satisfy one's hunger." --Chikan Zenji
%%
The wind-blown
Smoke of Mount Fuji
Vanishing far away!
Who knows the destiny
Of my thought?
--Sengai
%%
They spoke no word,
The visitor, the host,
And the white chrysanthemum.
--R.H. Blyth
%%
Simply trust:
Do not the petals flutter down,
Just like that?
--R.H. Blyth
%%
The Rose of Sharon
By the roadside,
Was eaten by the horse.
--R.H. Blyth
%%
Striking the fly
I hit also
A flowering plant.
--R.H. Blyth
%%
"The art of pleasing consists in being pleased." --William Hazlitt
%%
Though there must be winds
That it does not like,
Still the willow!
--Sengai
%%
The long night.
The sound of the water
Says what I think.
--Gochiku
%%
"Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements
(except dream cities) have problems." --Jane Jacobs
%%
  |\
  | \_________/////_
  | /\        \\\\\`
  |/  \
  /    \
 /|     \
 ||      \__
 ||      |\__
 ||       |\__
 ||        |\  "A bending reed does not break." --Confucius
%%
Even before His Majesty
The scarecrow does not remove
His plaited hat.
--Dansui
%%
"The tail of the kite, it is true, seems to negate the kite's function:
it weights down something made to rise..." --Cleanth Brooks
%%
Maybe if I listen closely to the rocks
Next time, I'll hear something, if not
A word, perhaps the faint beginning
  of a syllable.
--Phoebe Hanson
%%
"If an idea, I reasoned, were really a valuable one, there must be some
way of realizing it." --Elizabeth Blackwell
%%
"Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the
mind." --Alice Meynell
%%
"We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth
that is outside us." --Thomas Merton
%%
"The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and
create each other." --Meridel Le Sueur
%%
"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to
let alone." --H.D. Thoreau
%%
"Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but
acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter,
shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us
knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees." --E.F.
Schumacher
%%
"Sharing a burdened heart with another who has the wisdom, strength, and
knowledge to carry it, frees us from its weight long enough to focus on
solutions." --Liane Cordes
%%
"Man is a pliant animal--a being who gets accustomed to anything."
--Fyodor Dostoyevsky
%%
"...[I]f you listen carefully, you get to hear everything you didn't
want to hear in the first place." --Sholom Aleichem
%%
"Our soul makes constant noise, but it has a silent place we never
hear." --Simone Weil
%%
The question is laid out
For each of us to ask:
Whether to hold on
Or to drop the mask.
--Martha Boesing
%%
"The principle of life is that life responds by corresponding; your
life becomes the thing you have decided it shall be." --Raymond Charles
Barker
%%
"Everything has its own perfection, be it higher or lower in the scale
of things; and the perfection of one is not the perfection of another."
--John Henry Newman
%%
"We are whole beings. We know this somewhere in a part of ourselves that
feels like memory." --Susan Griffin
%%
"Any idea seriously entertained tends to bring about the realization of
itself." --Joseph Chilton Pearce
%%
"Rivers and roads lead people on." --Georgia O'Keeffe
%%
"So get a few laughs and do the best you can. Don't have an ideal to
work for. That's like riding towards the mirage of a lake." --Will
Rogers
%%
"There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening, we shall hear
the right word." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
%%
"Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent
to the dark place where it leads." --Erica Jong
%%
"It is possible to be different and still be all right. There can be
two--or more--answers to the same question, and all can be right." --Ann
Wilson Schaef
%%
"To find the good life you must become yourself." --Dr. Bill Jackson
%%
"Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to
others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you." --Carlos
Casteneda
%%
"We only do well the things we like doing." --Colette
%%
"...the healthy, the strong individual, is the one who asks for help
when he needs it whether he's got an abscess on his knee or in his
soul." --Rona Barrett
%%
"If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is
not love, but a transaction." --Emma Goldman
%%
"We are not educated: most of us cannot read or write. But we are strong
because we are close to the earth and we know what matters." --Mie Amano
%%
Two birds fly past.
They are needed somewhere.
--Robert Bly
%%
"My mission on earth is to recognize the void--inside and outside of
me--and fill it." --Rabbi Menahem
%%
"We have our brush and colors--paint Paradise and in we go." --Nikos
Kazantzakis
%%
"No man is an island entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main." --John Donne
%%
"...it wasn't sin that was born on the day when Eve picked an apple:
what was born on that day was a splendid virtue called disobedience."
--Oriana Fallaci
%%
The evening star
is the most
beautiful of all stars.
--Sappho
%%
"If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing
reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the
pear by eating it yourself." --Mao Tse-tung
%%
"The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds, and
words return to us sooner or later, with astounding accuracy."
--Florence Scovel Shinn
%%
"Putting a question correctly is one thing and finding the answer to it
is something quite different." --Anton Chekhov
%%
"Getting started can be very hard for people who have trouble with
beginnings. After all, where do beginnings begin?" --Dorothy Bryant
%%
"Together is a road travelled by the brave." --George Betts
%%
"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror
that receives it." --Edith Wharton
%%
"...the function of freedom is to free somebody else." --Toni Morrison
%%
"Continuous effort--not strength or intelligence--is the key to
unlocking our potential." --Liane Cordes
%%
"...be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to
love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that
are written in a very foreign tongue." --Rainer Maria Rilke
%%
"The still mind of the sage is a mirror of heaven and earth--the glass
of all things." --Chuang Tzu
%%
"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." --M. Kathleen Casey
%%
"Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don't
sit down without one of the gods." --D.H. Lawrence
%%
"Rattling around the back of my head is a disturbing image of something
I saw at the airport.... Now I'm remembering, those giant piles of com-
puter magazines right next to *People* and *Time* in the airport store.
Does it bother anyone else that half the world is being told all of our
hard-won secrets of computer technology? Remember how all the lawyers
cried foul when *How to Avoid Probate* was published? Are they taking
no-fault insurance lying down? No way! But at the current rate it won't
be long before there are stacks of the *Transactions on Information
Theory* at the A&P checkout counters. Who's going to be impressed with
us electrical engineers then? Are we, as the saying goes, giving away
the store?" --Robert W. Lucky, IEEE President
%%
"Maybe it's that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual
way through a wilderness of normality that is just a myth." --Lisa, in
Anne Rice's *Exit to Eden*
%%
"Who need be afraid of the merge?" --Walt Whitman, *Leaves of Grass*
%%
"At the sound of the bell in the silent night, I wake from my dream in
this dreamworld of ours. Gazing at the reflection of the moon in a clear
pool, I see, beyond my form, my real form." --Kojisei
%%
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
and out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.

--Shelley, "The Cloud"
%%
I celebrate myself
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

--Walt Whitman, *Leaves of Grass*
%%
"All reality is an activity which I share without being able to ap-
propriate for myself. Where there is no sharing there is no reality."
--Martin Buber
%%
"Dare we open our doors to the sources of our being? What are flesh and
bones for?" --Paul Reps
%%
If you work on your mind with your mind
How can you avoid an immense confusion?

--Seng-Ts'an
%%
The wild geese fly back to country
After country without a calendar.

--Shumpa
%%
"In the old days people knew how to dream. They did not have to go to
sleep first." --Friedrich Nietzche
%%
"Antisthenes says that in a certain faraway land the cold is so intense
that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time then
thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in winter go unheard until
the next summer." --Plutarch, *Moralia*
%%
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

--Andrew Marvell
%%
"We simply need to see... wild country available to us, even if we never
do more than drive to its edge and look in. It can be a means of reas-
suring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of
hope." --Wallace Stegner
%%
"We can try to kill all that is native, string it up by its hind legs
for all to see, but spirit howls and wildness endures." --Terry Tempest
Williams
%%
Now surrounded by light
I am serene.

--Ce'sar Vallejo
%%
For how tiny the world,
This ant's egg--and the sky!

--Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib
%%
"Thou didst create the deserts, mountains, and forests, but I produced
the orchards, gardens, and groves." --Turkmeni folk song
%%
"The smell of the Kalahari after sudden rain is something you never
forget. What blooms up, especially when the sun gets to work, and even
in cool-tending June weather, is an odor so powerful and so elusive that
you want to keep inhaling it in order to make up your mind which it is,
foul or sweet. It seems poised midway between the two poles. It's resin-
ous or like tar, and like the first smell of liver when it touches a hot
pan. It fades as the dryness returns, and as it does you will it to per-
sist until you can penetrate it." --Norman Rush, *Mating*
%%

DISTANCES OF THE GOBI

Mongolian wedding song

Even the peerlessly nomadic Ordos Mongols, long famed for Genghis Khan's
having recruited his household guard only form Ordos regiments, recog-
nize how dauntingly vast their Gobi homeland is. This traditional song
was sung at the wedding of the translators, which took place in the
Ordos section of the Gobi Desert.

Riding my horse Zandanhorum
We'll go to Zandanzhu
"How is everybody?"
Running across the sand
This horse is good
Whitefaced horse
Festooned with silk
My daughter lives so far away
With her husband's family
Running across the ice
This horse with silver spots
At the wedding my girl wore
Jewels and silver in her hair
Then she wore out her shoes
Crossing distant hills.
Translated by Paul and Sarengowa Maxwell
%%
"At night in this waterless air the stars come down just out of reach
of your fingers. In such a place lived the hermits of the early church
piercing to infinity with uninhibited minds. The great concept of one-
ness and of majestic order seems always to be born in the desert."
--John Steinbeck, *Log of the Sea of Cortez*
%%
"Neither titles nor eloquence do we require... but patience
to disengage difficulties until matters disclose their essence
without opposition, because the most subtle understanding out-
weighs mountains...." --Evan S. Connell
%%
"The bare earth, plantless, waterless, is an immense puzzle. In the
forests or beside rivers everything speaks to humans. The desert does
not speak. I could not comprehend its tongue; its silence...." --Pablo
Neruda
%%
"I find television very educational. Every time someone turns it on, I
go in the other room and read a book." --Groucho Marx
%%
"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it
flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."
--Matt Groening
%%
"Do not withold words from the fit. The unfit themselves, from the
words of the people of truth, become weary.... The heart of the unfit
and strangers towards truth is like the wick of a lamp which has been
filled with water rather than oil. No matter how many times you light
it, it will not light. But the heart of a friend is like an oil lamp
which draws and mixes fire from a distance." --Shihab al-D\-{i}n Yahya
Suhraward\-{i}
%%
Coyote Dance

Coyote - The Trickster
There is much the Indian has learned
from old coyote -
He is an actor - he would play dead
A magician, a survivor and a powerful
singer
He always wants it both ways
Is he like us or are we like him
%%
A hundred years have passed
Yet I hear the distant beat of my father's drums.
I hear his drums throughout the land.
His Beat I feel within my heart.

The drum shall beat
so my heart shall beat.
And I shall live a hundred thousand years.

--Shirley Daniels
%%
When the last red man shall have become a
myth among the white men, when your
children's children think themselves alone
in the field, upon the highway or in the
silence of the pathless woods, they will not
be alone. In all the earth there is no place
dedicated to solitude. At night when
the streets of your cities are silent,
and you think them deserted, they
will throng with the returning hosts
that once filled them and still love
this beautiful land. The white man
will never be alone.

--Chief Seattle
%%
As a child I understood how to give, I have
forgotten this grace since I have become
civilized.

--Chief Luther Standing Bear
%%
A song that asks the spirits of the earth and sky.
Thus weave for us a garment of brightness that we
may walk fittingly where the birds sing.

--Anonymous
%%
And all the while he danced to the high,
hectic rattle of the drum, virtually in
place, his motion translated into the
pure illusion...sometimes you look at a
thing and see only that it is opaque, that
it can not be looked into, and this
opacity is its essence, the very truth of
the matter. So it was for me with
the...mask. The man inside was merely
motion and he had no face, and his
name was the name of the mask itself.
had I lifted...(it), there should have
been no one and nothing to see.

--N. Scott Momaday
%%
And now, grandfather, I ask you to bless the
white man. He needs your wisdom, your
guidance. You see for so long he has tried to
destroy my people and only feels comfortable when
given power. Bless them, show them the peace we
understand, teach them humility. For I fear they
will destroy themselves and their children as they
have done
so with Mother Earth. I plead, I cry, after all
They are my brothers.

--Sandy Kewanhaptewa
%%
I'd run about on the desert,
   Me a young boy
Fierce to see whatever I could
       My heart was not cool
I saw a coyote, then a spider stopped
To look at me
     A shaman sang, a puff of dust
  Comes out of his dry throat
The dancers receive the message,
       Their life-giving
Feathers black as night, white as cloud

Me - I'm not telling you this myself
I'm only giving you the revelations
Which I've learned from somebody else.

--inspiration from *Shaking the Pumpkin*
%%
"The Balinese embark on a marathon session of reading aloud after they
have prepared a corpse for burial. They read stories without stopping
for days at a time in order to keep out the demons." The narrative maze
that the stories build is "a kind of defense fortification, a wall of
words, which operates like the jamming of a radio broadcast" which the
demons cannot penetrate. --from the introduction to *Expletives Deleted*
by Angela Carter
%%
My entourage and I left the forest and walked through the outskirts of
town. I heard a deep boom like a foghorn, then saw, emerging from a
doorway, a six-foot, writhing haystack. The children screamed, "*Feti-
cheur!*" and we followed him as he boomed and danced through Ouidah's
narrow back streets. In the plaza our fetish joined other dancing hay-
stacks, one of whom had a devil's head. The dancing would go on into the
night.

I wandered behind the fort and by pure dumb accident stumbled onto the
*vodoun* market. Dozens of fetishers had laid out their wares on the
ground: rows of animal skins and bird bodies, turtle skulls, dried cha-
meleons, dark monkey hands lined up in a beseeching row, palms up. I was
horrified by this trade in literal flesh and bone (wondering how much of
the pharmacopeia was rare or endangered), but also enthralled by the
sense of secret business. For nearly an hour I eavesdropped on customers
as they recited their maladies and received their prescriptions.

Eventually I collected my nerve and approached the young apprentice of a
fetisher. "Something for my love life," I told him. "*Ah oui, mademoi-
selle,*" he said, nodding, with the precise demeanor of a young physi-
cian. He introduced himself, asked some diagnostic questions, then led
me into a small tent. My heart began to pound. Inside, lined up museum-
like, were hundreds of *gris-gris*. There are different types, he ex-
plained clinically, for success in business, for improving the memory,
for safe travel. He briefly assessed his inventory and produced my love
charm: two small sticks bound to a piece of bone, stained dark with
blood. This is a powerful one, he said, blessed in a fire ceremony at
the temple in Abomey. It has *la force Africaine*. He provided me with
extremely complex instructions, promising that if correctly used my
*gris-gris* would repel all the wrong sorts of men, attract the right
one, and keep him interested. Then he produced a bell from some hidden
place, rang it forcefully in my ears, and sang an elaborate chant from
which I could pick out only my name, repeated three times. He touched
the charm to my collarbone, and then it was mine. For approximately
three dollars I walked away with a guarantee of future bliss.

--from "The Vibrations of Djoogbe", Barbara Kingsolver
%%
"The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears." --John Vance
Cheney
%%
"You white people are so strange. We think it is very primitive for a
child to have only two parents." --Australian aboriginal elder
%%
"There are two types of people--those who come into a room and say,
`Well, here I am!' and those who come in and say, `Ah, there you are.'"
--Frederick L. Collins
%%
"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty
recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but
the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream
with open eyes, to make it possible." --T.E. Lawrence
%%
"Society--which meant pagan society, limited by the horizons and
prospects of life `in this world'--was regarded by [the Desert Fathers]
as a shipwreck from which each single individual man had to swim for his
life." --Thomas Merton
%%
"[The Desert Fathers] were men who believed that to let oneself drift
along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as
society, was purely and simply a disaster." --Thomas Merton
%%
"...whatever you see your soul to desire according to God, do that
thing, and you shall keep your heart safe." --St. Anthony
%%
"The spiritual cataclysms that sometimes overtook some of the
presumptuous visionaries of the desert are there to show the dangers of
the lonely life--like bones whitening in the sand." --Thomas Merton
%%
"The prayer of the monk is not perfect until he no longer realizes
himself or the fact that he is praying." --St. Anthony
%%
"If we were to seek [the like of the Desert Fathers] in twentieth-cen-
tury America, we would have to look in strange, out of the way places.
Such beings are tragically rare. They obviously do not flourish on the
sidewalk at Forty-Second Street and Broadway." --Thomas Merton
%%
"What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the
abyss that separates us from ourselves?" --Thomas Merton
%%
"[The Desert Fathers] were humble, quiet, sensible people with a deep
knowledge of human nature and enough understanding of the things of God
to realize that they knew very little about Him." --Thomas Merton
%%
"If [the Desert Fathers] say little about God, it is because they know
that when one has been somewhere close to His dwelling, silence makes
more sense than a lot of words." --Thomas Merton
%%
"Love in fact *is* the spiritual life, and without it all the other
exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and
become mere illusions." --Thomas Merton
%%
"The Coptic hermits who left the world as though escaping from a wreck,
did not merely intend to save themselves. They knew that they were
helpless to do any good for others as long as they floundered about in
the wreckage. But once they got a foothold on solid ground, things were
different. Then they had not only the power but even the obligation to
pull the whole world to safety after them." --Thomas Merton
%%
"If, wishing to correct another, you are moved to anger, you gratify
your own passion. Do not lose yourself in order to save another."
--Abbot Macarius
%%
"The word `now' is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks."
--Arthur Miller
%%
"America is an irony-free zone." --Ruby Wax
%%
"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes." --Thoreau
%%
"If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup." --Turkish proverb
%%
"You should not see the desert simply as some faraway place of little
rain. There are many forms of thirst." --William Langewiesche
%%
In March, static electricity apparently caused an election computer to
miscount results of a Polk County, Ore., tax measure. After officials
sprayed the carpet around the computer with Downy Fabric Softener, the
tax proposal passed, *The Wall Street Journal* reported.
%%
"Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have
entertained angels unawares." --Hebrews 13:2
%%
"It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe." --Barry Lopez
%%
"Earth with her thousand voices praises God." --Samuel Taylor Coleridge
%%
The secret of the receptive
Must be sought in stillness;
Within stillness there remains
The potential for action.

--Zhou Xuanjiing
%%
"It is the child that sees the primordial secret in Nature and it is the
child of ourselves we return to. The child within us is simple and
daring enough to live the Secret." --Lao-Tzu
%%
"When they are in nature, people sense intuitively that the other king-
doms are living in harmony with universal law. In such an environment
it's easier for the heart to open, to become softer and live in tune
with the earth." --Wabun, Sun Bear's medicine helper
%%
"The song and the land are one." --Bruce Chatwin
%%
"...Learn to see, and then you'll know that there is no end to the new
worlds of our vision." --Carlos Castaneda
%%
"Travelers, there is no path, paths are made by walking." --Antonio
Machado
%%
"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome
it." --John 1:5
%%
"According to a Canadian Press report in September, a customer at the
Napierville, Quebec, pet shop Animalerie Napierville threatened to
report the shop to the government's French-language monitoring office
because she was shown a parrot that spoke only English." --*News of the
Weird*
%%
"And St. Francis said to the almond tree: 'Sister, speak to me of love.'
And the almond tree blossomed." --Kazantzakis
%%
"No man, however civilized, can listen for very long to African drum-
ming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his
critical and self-conscious personality." --Aldous Huxley
%%
"In cyberspace I may get flamed, but I know I won't get shot." --John
Perry Barlow, observing one of the not-so-fine distinctions between
cyberspace and "meatspace", what he calls the physical world
%%
"We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library whose
walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues
... The child does not understand the languages in which they are writ-
ten. He notes a definite plan in the arrangement of books, a mysterious
order which he does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects." --Albert
Einstein
%%
"Truly the gods have not from the beginning revealed all things to
mortals, but by long seeking, mortals make progress in discovery."
--Xenophanes of Colophon
%%
"He calmly rode on, leaving it to his horse's discretion to go which way
it pleased, firmly believing that in this consisted the very essence of
adventures." --Cervantes, *Don Quixote*
%%
"The colors in your magazine rule! I see large blue dots every time I
finish an issue." --Erik Blad <rblad@southwind.net>, in a note to
*WiReD* magazine's "Rants & Raves"
%%
"Chess is a cramped game. It is like a knife fight in a phone booth."
--Wayne Folta
%%
     "Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on.
     "I do," Alice Hastily replied;  "at least I mean what I say--that's the
same thing you know."
     "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "Why, you might as well say
that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see."

                                                                --Lewis Caroll
%%
"A private railroad car is not an acquired taste. One takes to it
immediately." --Eleanor R. Belmont
%%
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any
good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." --Howard Aiken
%%
How to Form Your Very Own Silicon Valley:

Step 1:  Go to Menlo Park. Find a tree.
Step 2:  Shake the tree. A venture capitalist will fall out.
Step 3:  Before the venture capitalist regains its wits, recite the
         following incantation: "Internet! Electronic Commerce!
         Distributed Enterprise-Enabled Applications! Java!"
Step 4:  The venture capitalist will give you four million dollars.
Step 5:  In 18 months, go public.
Step 6:  After you receive your check, go back to Menlo Park. Find a
         tree.
Step 7:  Climb it. Wait.

--Laura Lemay
%%
"A shaman is a person who is an expert at developing relationships with
other spirits." --Eliot Cowan
%%
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect
wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long
for the endless immensity of the sea." --Antoine de Saint Exupery
%%
"Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by
the prudent as the heavy petting of literature." --Fran Lebowitz
%%
"The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that
will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful." --Mark
Twain
%%
"If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any
other way." --Mark Twain
%%
"...I would suggest that, today, we know about as much concerning the
human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300." --Alan Watts
%%
"When Big Brother arrives, don't be surprised if he looks like a grocery
clerk." --Howard Rheingold
%%
"Never order a pie within one mile of an interstate." --Sue Hubbell
%%
"Every program in development at MIT expands until it can read mail."
--Unknown
%%
"The conservation movement is a breeding ground of Communists and other
subversives. We intend to clean them out, even if it means rounding up
every bird watcher in the country." --John Mitchell, US Attorney General
(1969-72)
%%
"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull
his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you
understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send
signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there
is no cat." --Albert Einstein
%%
The Sense of a Goose

When you see geese flying along in "V" formation, you might consider
what science has discovered as to why they fly that way. As each bird
flaps its wings, it creates an uplift for the bird immediately follow-
ing. By flying in "V" formation, the whole flock adds at least 71 per-
cent greater flying range than if each bird flew on its own. People who
share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are
going more quickly and easily because they are traveling on the thrust
of one another. When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels
the drag and resistance of trying to go it alone - and quickly gets back
into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird in
front. If we have as much sense as a goose, we will stay in formation
with those people who are headed the same way we are.

When the head goose gets tired, it rotates back in the wing and another
goose flies point. It is sensible to take turns doing demanding jobs,
whether with people or with geese flying south.

Geese honk from behind to encourage those up front to keep up their
speed. What messages do we give when we honk from behind?

Finally--and this is important--when a goose gets sick or is wounded by
gunshot, and falls out of formation, two other geese fall out with that
goose and follow it down to lend help and protection. They stay with the
fallen goose until it is able to fly or until it dies, and only then do
they launch out on their own, or with another formation to catch up with
their group. If we have the sense of a goose, we will stand by each
other like that.

--Dr. Robert McNeish
%%
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled."
--Plutarch
%%
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough [to break modern encryption]
would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers."
--Bill Gates, in *The Road Ahead*
%%
A government is the only known vessel that leaks from the top." --James
Reston
%%
If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me."
--Alice Roosevelt Longworth
%%
"Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or
near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other
people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second
is pleasant and highly paid." --Bertrand Russell
%%
"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's
too dark to read." --Groucho Marx
%%
"Small investors are somewhat important to the market--in much the same
way that stranded motorists are important to horror movies." --Tom
Tomorrow
%%
"How could they tell?" --Dorothy Parker, on being told that President
Calvin Coolidge had just died
%%
"Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
--H.L. Mencken
%%
Santa Claus has the right idea: visit people once a year." --Victor
Borge
%%
"Do you know on this one block you can buy croissants in five different
places? There's one store called Bonjour Croissant. It makes me want to
go to Paris and open a store called Hello Toast." --Fran Lebowitz
%%
"France is the only country where the money falls apart and you can't
tear the toilet paper." --Billy Wilder
%%
"I think he's crude, I think he's medieval, and I don't want an elderly
gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me."
--Vladimir Nabokov
%%
"I did not attend his funeral, but I wrote a nice letter saying I
approved it." --Mark Twain
%%
"She got her good looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon."
--Groucho Marx
%%
"I feel a very unusual sensation--if it is not indigestion, I think it
must be gratitude." --Benjamin Disraeli
%%
"If you reveal your secrets to the wind you should not blame the wind
for revealing them to the trees." --Kahlil Gibran
%%
"When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened
or not." --Mark Twain
%%
"Nutrimentum spiritus." --inscription on the Berlin Royal Library
%%
"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to
have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself
in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordi-
nary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
--Sir Isaac Newton
%%
"A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps,
snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana
bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar,
sore hats, a peon, a canal--Panama!" --Theodore Roosevelt
%%
"You can lead a camel to water, but you can't make it stink (any worse
than it already does)." --Larry Wall
%%
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting
than the question of whether a submarine can swim." --E.W. Dijkstra
%%
"I think there's a world market for about five computers." --Thomas
Watson, founder of IBM
%%
"When the war finally came to an end, I was at a loss as to what to
do... I took stock of my qualifications. A not-very-good degree, re-
deemed somewhat by my achievements at the Admiralty. A knowledge of
certain restricted parts of magnetism and hydrodynamics, neither of them
subjects for which I felt the least bit of enthusiasm. No published
papers at all... Only gradually did I realize that this lack of qualifi-
cation could be an advantage. By the time most scientists have reached
age thirty they are trapped by their own expertise. They have invested
so much effort in one particular field that it is often extremely diffi-
cult, at that time in their careers, to make a radical change. I, on the
other hand, knew nothing, except for a basic training in somewhat old-
fashioned physics and mathematics and an ability to turn my hand to new
things... Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely
free choice..." --Francis Crick
%%
I recognize that many physicists are smarter than I am--most of them
theoretical physicists. A lot of smart people have gone into theoretical
physics, therefore the field is extremely competitive. I console myself
with the thought that although they may be smarter and may be deeper
thinkers than I am, I have broader interests than they have." --Linus
Pauling
%%
"God made the integers. All else is the work of Man." --Kronecker
%%
"It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our
preaching." --St. Francis Of Assisi
%%
"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it
should end there." --Clare Booth Luce
%%
"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be
chewed and digested." --Francis Bacon
%%
"To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new
friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one." --Chinese
saying
%%
"The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old
ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into
every corner of our minds." --John Maynard Keynes
%%
"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual
beings having a human experience." --Pierre Theilard de Chardin
%%
"Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one."
--Augustine Birrell
%%
"Every great scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people
say it conflicts with the Bible. Next they say it had been discovered
before. Lastly they say they always believed it." --Louis Agassiz
%%
"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a
reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating
the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for
independence." --Charles Austin Beard
%%
"To undertake a project, as the word's derivation indicates, means to
cast an idea out ahead of oneself so that it gains autonomy and is
fulfilled not only by the efforts of its originator but, indeed,
independently of him as well." --Czeslaw Milosz
%%
"It does not matter whether the cat is black or white. So long as it
catches the mouse, it is a good cat." --Deng Xiaoping
%%
"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence
stops." --Henry Adams
%%
"A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat
which isn't there." --Charles Darwin
%%
"Wanted, dead or alive: Schroedinger's cat." --Unknown
%%
"Good taste is the enemy of creativity." --Picasso
%%
"We have Art that we may not perish from Truth." --Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche
%%
"One rides to the ocean on horseback, but after that the wooden horse of
mystical silence must carry you. When that boat sinks, you are the fish,
neither silent nor speaking, a marvel with no name." --Jelaluddin Rumi
%%
"Any computer scientist who praises orthogonality should be sentenced to
use an Etch-a-Sketch." --Larry Wall
%%
"A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well
known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized." --Fred Allen
%%
"Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms.
And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some."
--Alfred Hitchcock
%%
"Architecture is frozen music." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
%%
"Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good."
--Mahatma Gandhi
%%
"All ideologies end up killing people. If you separate love from nonvio-
lence you turn nonviolence into an ideology, a gimmick. Structures that
are not inhabited by justice and love have no liberating or reconciling
force, and are never sources of life." --Jean Goss
%%
"We know the truth, not only by the reason, but by the heart." --Blaise
Pascal
%%
"Even as a tree has a single trunk but many branches and leaves, there
is one religion--human religion--but any number of faiths." --Mahatma
Gandhi
%%
"We can debug relationships, but it's always good policy to consider
the people themselves to be features. People get annoyed when you try
to debug them." --Larry Wall
%%
"I never thought my speeches were too long. I enjoyed them." --Hubert
Humphrey
%%
"Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a
child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must
remain always in the infancy of knowledge." --Cicero
%%
"An eye for an eye, and the whole world would be blind." --Kahlil Gibran
%%
"Each minute, each second of life is a miracle. Each bowl I wash, each
poem I compose, each time I invite a bell to sound is a miracle, and
each has exactly the same value. If I am incapable of washing dishes
joyfully, if I want to finish them quickly so I can go and have a cup of
tea, I will be equally incapable of drinking the tea joyfully. With the
cup in my hands I will be thinking about what to do next, and the fra-
grance and the flavor of the tea, together with the pleasure of drinking
it, will be lost. I will always be dragged into the future, never able
to live in the present moment." --Thich Nhat Hanh, *Sunshine and Green
Leaves*
%%
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."
--Mark Twain
%%
"Give Me Immortality Or Give Me Death." --Firesign Theatre
%%
"Before I criticize a man, I walk a mile in his shoes. That way, if he
gets angry, he's a mile away and barefoot." --Unknown
%%
"In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things
with great love." --Mother Teresa
%%
"Caution: This tomato soup combined with our chicken noodle soup can
form a lethal nerve gas." --soup label in a Sidney Harris cartoon
%%
"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve
change amid order." --Alfred North Whitehead
%%
"I attribute the little I know to having not been ashamed to ask for
information, and to my rule of conversing with all descriptions of men
on those topics that form their own peculiar professions and pursuits."
--John Locke
%%
"Put a Federal agency in charge of the Sahara Desert and it would run
out of sand." --Peggy Noonan
%%
"Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought." --Henri Bergson
%%
"None preaches better than the ant. And she says nothing." --Benjamin
Franklin
%%
A Zen Master said to his disciple: "Go get my rhinoceros-horn fan."
Disciple: "Sorry, Master, it is broken."
Master: "Okay, then get me the rhinoceros."
%%
"Be warned that being an expert is more than understanding how a system
is supposed to work. Expertise is gained by investigating why a system
doesn't work." --Brian Redman, Bell Communications Research, "UUCP
UNIX-to-UNIX Copy", *Unix Networking*, edited by Stephen Kochan and
Patrick Wood
%%
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.

D.H. Lawrence
%%
In the skin of our fingers
we can see the trail of the wind;
it shows us where the wind blew
when our ancestors were created.

--Native American (Navajo) Legend
%%
"In the skin of our fingers we can see the trail of the wind; it shows
us where the wind blew when our ancestors were created." --Navajo Legend
%%
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes."
--Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS
%%
Hearing a disturbance, the master       The novice thought for a moment. "I
programmer went into the novice's       will design a new editing program,"
cubicle.                                he said, "a program that will
                                        replace all these others."
"Curse these personal computers!"
cried the novice in anger, "To make     Suddenly the master struck the
them do anything I must use three or    novice on the side of the head. It
even four editing programs.             was not a heavy blow, but the novice
Sometimes I get so confused I erase     was nonetheless surprised. "What did
entire files. This is truly intoler-    you do that for?" exclaimed the
able!"                                  novice.

The master programmer stared at the     "I have no wish to learn another
novice. "And what would you do to       editing program," said the master.
remedy this state of affairs?" he
asked.                                  And suddenly the novice was
                                        enlightened. []
%%
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------\
|                                                                             |
|  Hearing a disturbance,    The master programmer     the side of the head.  |
|  the master programmer     stared at the novice.     It was not a heavy     |
|  went into the novice's    "And what would you do    blow, but the novice   |
|  cubicle.                  to remedy this state      was nonetheless        |
|                            of affairs?" he asked.    surprised. "What did   |
|  "Curse these personal                               you do that for?"      |
|  computers!" cried the     The novice thought for    exclaimed the novice.  |
|  novice in anger, "To      a moment. "I will                                |
|  make them do anything     design a new editing      "I have no wish to     |
|  I must use three or       program," he said, "a     learn another editing  |
|  even four editing         program that will         program," said the     |
|  programs. Sometimes I     replace all these         master.                |
|  get so confused I         others."                                         |
|  erase entire files.                                 And suddenly the       |
|  This is truly intoler-    Suddenly the master       novice was             |
|  able!"                    struck the novice on      enlightened. []        |
|                                                                             |
\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------/
%%
/----------------------------------------------------------------------------\
|                                                                            |
|  Hearing a  disturbance,  The master  programmer   the side of  the  head. |
|  the master  programmer   stared at  the  novice.  It  was  not  a  heavy  |
|  went into the novice's   "And what would you do   blow, but  the  novice  |
|  cubicle.                 to remedy  this  state   was  nonetheless   sur- |
|                           of affairs?" he asked.   prised. "What did  you  |
|  "Curse these  personal                            do  that   for?"    ex- |
|  computers!" cried  the   The novice thought for   claimed the novice.     |
|  novice in  anger,  "To   a  moment.   "I   will                           |
|  make them do  anything   design a  new  editing   "I  have  no  wish  to  |
|  I must  use  three  or   program," he said,  "a   learn another  editing  |
|  even four editing  pro-  program that  will  re-  program,"   said   the  |
|  grams. Sometimes I get   place all these others.  master.                 |
|  so  confused I   erase                                                    |
|  entire files. This  is   Suddenly  the   master   And    suddenly    the  |
|  truly intolerable!"      struck the  novice  on   novice was enlightened. |
|                                                                            |
\----------------------------------------------------------------------------/
%%
"A body on vacation tends to remain on vacation unless acted upon by an
outside force." --Carol Reichel
%%
"Do not meddle in the affairs of troff, for it is subtle and quick to
anger." --fortune(6) cookie
%%
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there." --Indira Gandhi
%%
"Using encryption on the Internet is the equivalent of arranging an
armored car to deliver credit-card information from someone living in
a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench." --Gene Spafford
%%
"The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at
least until we've finished building it." --fortune(6) cookie
%%
"I think it would be a good idea." --Mahatma Gandhi, on Western
civilization
%%
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea--massive,
difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of
mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." --Gene
Spafford
%%
"Officer! Officer! Arrest that man! He's whistling a dirty song!" --Jean
Ellison (a.k.a. Mother)
%%
"Although plastic was brought into industrial use in 1909 by L.H.
Baekeland of Yonkers, it was not until after World War II that the
modern miracle substance was used in a wide variety of consumer goods,
among them speedboats, dentures and flamingos. Previously flamingos were
made of cement. Before that they were made by other flamingos."
--William E. Geist, *The New York Times*
%%
"Desert Storm was a stirring victory for the forces of aggression and
lawlessness." --former Vice President Dan Quayle
%%
"The past may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme." --Mark Twain
%%
This hermit's hill has always been dear to me,
Also this hedgerow, which keeps me hidden
Partially from the gaze of the wide horizon.
Sitting here and looking, I fashion with my mind
The spaces beyond the earth that have no end,
And those silences that are not human at all,
And the deepest of all quiet; for a little while
My heart feels no fear. Then as I hear wind
Freshen through the leaves, I go farther
And compare this sound to that ever-
Lasting silence; and I remember eternity
And all the long dead seasons, and this present season
Alive with her voices. And so my thoughts
Find themselves, in that immensity, shipwrecked;
And sweet to me is the drowning in that sea.

--Giacomo Leopardi
%%
Mankind owns four things
That are no good at sea;
Rudder, anchor, oars,
And the fear of going down.

--Antonio Machado
%%
The captain walks on the planks of fearful things that might happen;
He walks on the decking of marvelous things that might happen.
When both decking and planks are gone, nothing remains but the drowning.

--Rumi
%%
If someone insults you,
Go on, with light heart;
If they *all* do it, pay
No heed to what they say.
  There's no new art
  In talk of that kind.
*Wind will blow it all away.*

If someone praises Devotion
Implying of course it's OK,
But says of course the works
Of the Law are much greater,
  It's weird dogma,
  Pass by, don't bother.
*Wind will blow it all away.*

And if they next, to make
You less open to God,
Say (to flatter you)
That you are truly great:
  Turn your back
  To talk of that sort.
*Wind will blow it all away.*

And if the world itself
Should come, money, castles,
Great sweets in its hand, just say,
"I have enough today."
  For worldly things
  Return whence they came.
*Wind will blow it all away.*

And if people name a place
(Not God's) where all sorrow
Will be settled, all be saved,
They have an evil aim.
  Be strong, say no
  To these odd people.
*Wind will blow it all away.*

--Margaret of Navarre
%%
My friend, I went to the market and bought the dark-faced one.
You claim by night, I say by day.
Actually I was beating a drum all the time I was buying him.
You say I paid too much; I say too little.
Actually I put him on a scale before I bought him.
What I paid was my social body, my town body, my family body, and
 all my inherited jewels.
Mirabai says: The Holy One is my husband now.
Be with me when I lie down; you promised me this in an earlier life.

--Mirabai
%%
I am not I.
            I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
And whom at other times I forget;
The one who remains silent when I talk,
The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
The one who takes a walk where I am not,
The one who will remain standing when I die.

--Juan Ramo'n Jime'nez
%%
"One day in the near future, when the last corporate headquarters has
been torn down and we all earn our livings at the domestic terminal,
anthologies of twentieth-century inter-office memos may be as treasured
as the correspondence of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot." --J.G. Ballard
%%
"Don't anthropomorphize computers. They don't like it." --fortune(6)
cookie
%%
I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

--Pablo Neruda, One Hundred Love Sonnets, Sonnet XVII: Love
%%
anon:     Goodness, what lovely diamonds.
Mae West: Goodness had nothing to do with it.
%%
"Novelists are not the nicest people. Touchy, unloved, and aware
that the novel's greatest days lie back in the age of steam, we
occupy a rung on the ladder of likability somewhere between tax
inspectors and immigration officials, with whom all too many of
us share an unworthy interest in money and social origins."
--J.G. Ballard
%%
"What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." --Ludwig
Wittgenstein
%%
"Basic research may seem very expensive. I am a well-paid scientist. My
hourly wage is equal to that of a plumber, but sometimes my research
remains barren of results for weeks, months or years and my conscience
begins to bother me for wasting the taxpayer's money. But in reviewing
my life's work, I have to think that the expense was not wasted. Basic
research, to which we owe everything, is relatively very cheap when
compared with other outlays of modern society. The other day I made a
rough calculation which led me to the conclu- sion that if one were to
add up all the money ever spent by man on basic research, one would find
it to be just about equal to the money spent by the Pentagon this past
year." --Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, *The Crazy Ape*, 1971
%%
As Gandhi stepped aboard a train one day, one of his shoes slipped off
and landed on the track. He was unable to retrieve it as the train was
moving. To the amazement of his companions, Gandhi calmly took off his
other shoe and threw it back along the track to land close to the first.
Asked by a fellow passenger why he did so, Gandhi smiled. "The poor man
who finds the shoes lying on the track," he replied, "will now have a
pair he can use."
%%
"What is appropriate for the master is not appropriate for the novice.
You must understand Tao before transcending structure." --The Tao of
Programming
%%
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion,
butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance
accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give
orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem,
pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently,
die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." --Robert Heinlein
%%
"In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of
people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." --Douglas
Adams, *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*
%%
"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour
to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ig-
nores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology,
led them into it in the first place." --Douglas Adams, on Windows 95
%%
"To err is human, to moo bovine."
%%
"The God-Messenger, Khidr, touches a roasted fish. It leaps off the
grill back into the water." --Jelaluddin Rumi
%%
"In the beginning was noise. And noise begat rhythm. And rhythm begat
everything else." --Mickey Hart
%%
And all this is nothing compared to the rumors that are going the rounds
- that we shall shortly be fitted with pocket wireless telephones, with
which we can call up Charlie Chaplin and Lloyd George. Think of going to
the movies then! In the most thrilling quarter of the eighth massive
part, just when the lights are down and only a green spot follows the
villain as he creeps across the hearthrug to his victim - and trips
headlong over his trusty bulldog - just then there is a tinkle in our
waistcoats pocket and a voice from another world shrills: "Come home at
once, John. The furnace fire has gone out."

                                 * * *

Excerpted from a 1919 *Pacific Telephone Magazine*, reprinted in the
Spring 1996 issue of *California History*, the magazine of the Cali-
fornia Historical Society.
%%
"Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole." --Roger
Caras
%%
"Dawn. When men of reason go to bed." --Ambrose Bierce
%%
"I am one
 Who eats breakfast
 Gazing at morning glories." --Basho
%%
The 7 Habits of Highly Engineered People
by Po Bronson

1.  They will be selfish in their generousness, and they will attempt to
    look generous in their selfishness.
2.  Blindness improves their vision.
3.  They'll not only bite the hand that feeds them, but they'll bite
    their own hand.
4.  They will try very hard to maintain the image that they care not at
    all about their image.
5.  They will keep fixing what's not broken until it's broken.
6.  I didn't answer incorrectly, you just asked the wrong question.
7.  Consider absence of criticism a compliment.
%%
Life offers us opportunities to think in terms of what is happening now,
and to be aware of what is taking place all around us, by focusing on
current thoughts, ideas, feelings, and experiences. Where you are *is*
where you have come from and where you are going. We do not always have
to live by the clock. Mother Earth has her own unique rhythms that
signal the beginnings and endings of things. Again, we need only to
observe and listen quietly to know when it is time. So-called "Indian
time" says that things begin when they are ready, and things end when
they are finished. --*Medicine of the Cherokee: The Way of Right
Relationship*
%%
"Please don't lie to me, unless you're absolutely sure I'll never find
out the truth." --Ashleigh Brilliant
%%
"Wordstar on an 4.077MHz 8088 could keep up with my typing; WinWord
under Windoze on a 300 MHz PII can't." --Seth Briedbart
%%
"The earth laughs in flowers." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
%%
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask
about Exchange Server next....
%%
"Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind."
--Marston Bates
%%
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
--Douglas Adams
%%
"To stay young requires the unceasing cultivation of the ability to
unlearn old falsehoods." --Lazarus Long
%%
"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
--Henry Spencer
%%
"What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?" --Dr. Who
%%
"English doesn't borrow from other languages - English follows other
languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their
pockets for loose grammar."
%%
"Criminals today have guns. Soon they will have computers and other
weapons of mass destruction." --U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno
%%
"Edith, I'm speaking in English and you're listening in dingbat."
--Archie Bunker
%%
"Jesus was a Jew, yes, but only on his mother's side." --Archie Bunker
%%
"What's this I hear about making Puerto Rico a steak? The next thing
they'll be wanting is a salad, and then a baked potato." --Emily Litella
(Gilda Radner, "Saturday Night Live")
%%
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." --Albert Einstein
%%
"Progress was fine in its day, but it's certainly gone on long enough!"
--Archie Bunker
%%
"The Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum. Rescinded by Executive
Order, President William Jefferson Clinton. Spin can now be infinite."
--Michael Swaine
%%
"What's that Lassie? There's trouble at the farm? The web server's down?
apachectl restart Lassie! apachectl restart!" --fortune(6) cookie
%%
"At the beginning of the week, we sealed ten BSD programmers into a
computer room with a single distribution of BSD Unix. Upon opening the
room after seven days, we found all ten programmers dead, clutching each
other's throats, and thirteen new flavors of BSD." --fortune(6) cookie
%%
ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE
ACTION CAUSES MORE TROUBLE THAN THOUGHT
ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED
AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE
ANY SURPLUS IS IMMORAL
AWFUL PUNISHMENT AWAITS REALLY BAD PEOPLE
BEING HAPPY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING ELSE
BOREDOM MAKES YOU DO CRAZY THINGS
CHANGE IS VALUABLE WHEN THE OPPRESSED BECOME TYRANTS
CHILDREN ARE THE CRUELEST OF ALL
CHILDREN ARE THE HOPE OF THE FUTURE
CONFUSING YOURSELF IS A WAY TO STAY HONEST
IF YOU LIVE SIMPLY THERE IS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT
INHERITANCE MUST BE ABOLISHED
IT IS MAN'S FATE TO OUTSMART HIMSELF
IT'S BETTER TO BE NAIVE THAN JADED
IT'S CRUCIAL TO HAVE AN ACTIVE FANTASY LIFE
JUST BELIEVING SOMETHING CAN MAKE IT HAPPEN
LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL
MONEY CREATES TASTE
MOTHERS SHOULDN'T MAKE TOO MANY SACRIFICES
MURDER HAS ITS SEXUAL SIDE
NOTHING UPSETS THE BALANCE OF GOOD AND EVIL
PEOPLE ARE BORING UNLESS THEY'RE EXTREMISTS
PEOPLE WHO GO CRAZY ARE TOO SENSITIVE
PRIVATE PROPERTY CREATED CRIME
PUSH YOURSELF TO THE LIMIT AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE
RAISE BOYS AND GIRLS THE SAME WAY
RANDOM MATING IS GOOD FOR DEBUNKING SEX MYTHS
ROMANTIC LOVE WAS INVENTED TO MANIPULATE WOMEN
SACRIFICING YOURSELF FOR A BAD CAUSE IS NOT A MORAL ACT
SALVATION CAN'T BE BOUGHT AND SOLD
SELFISHNESS IS THE MOST BASIC MOTIVATION
SELFLESSNESS IS THE HIGHEST ACHIEVEMENT
SLIPPING INTO MADNESS IS GOOD FOR THE SAKE OF COMPARISON
SLOPPY THINKING GETS WORSE OVER TIME
SOMETIMES SCIENCE ADVANCES FASTER THAN IT SHOULD
THE MORE YOU KNOW THE BETTER OFF YOU ARE
THE WORLD OPERATES ACCORDING TO DISCOVERABLE LAWS
THERE ARE TOO FEW IMMUTABLE TRUTHS TODAY
THERE'S NOTHING EXCEPT WHAT YOU SENSE
TIMIDITY IS LAUGHABLE
TORTURE IS BARBARIC
TRUE FREEDOM IS FRIGHTFUL
USING FORCE TO STOP FORCE IS ABSURD
WISHING THINGS AWAY IS NOT EFFECTIVE
YOU ARE GUILELESS IN YOUR DREAMS
YOU ARE THE PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE
YOU OWE THE WORLD NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND
YOUR ACTIONS ARE POINTLESS IF NO ONE NOTICES

--Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
  Artist: Jenny Holzer
%%
"Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it,
that's trustworthiness." --George W. Bush
%%
"Inter arma enim silent leges." --Cicero
%%
"It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of
common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever
ineligible for public office." --H.L. Mencken
%%
"Ever consider what they must think of us? I mean, here we come back
from a grocery store with the most amazing haul: chicken, pork, half a
cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!" --Anne Tyler
%%
"You know, in America, if people like what we do, that's enough. I don't
think it has to mean anything. I don't know what a hamburger means, but
it makes life worth living." --Gene Simmons
%%
"Dog: A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the
overflow and surplus of the world's worship." --Ambrose Bierce
%%
"She said it was either her or the ham radio; over." --net.signature
%%
"Here at the Phone Company we handle eighty-four billion calls a year.
Serving everyone from presidents and kings to scum of the earth.

We realize that every so often you can't get an operator, for no
apparent reason your phone goes out of order [plucks plug out of
switchboard], or perhaps you get charged for a call you didn't make. We
don't care. Watch this -- [bangs on a switch panel like a cheap piano]
just lost Peoria.

You see, this phone system consists of a multibillion-dollar matrix of
space-age technology that is so sophisticated, even we can't handle it.
But that's your problem, isn't it? Next time you complain about your
phone service, why don't you try using two Dixie cups with a string.

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company."

--Lily (Ernestine) Tomlin, on Saturday Night Live
%%
"In God we Trust; all others must submit an X.509 certificate."
--Charles Forsythe <forsythe@alum.mit.edu>
%%
"I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions--the
curtain was up." --George S. Kaufman
%%
"The law in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor
to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
--Anatole France
%%
"In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."
--Johann von Neumann
%%
"California is just like the rest of the country, only moreso."
--Wallace Stegner
%%
Q: The old Silicon Valley status symbol was a Ferrari or a Lamborghini.
   What's the new Silicon Valley status symbol?
A: A job.
%%
"If you spend more money on coffee than IT security you will be hacked.
And moreover, you deserve to be hacked." --U.S. Cybersecurity Czar
Richard A. Clarke
%%
"Near the rose period's close, he was taken up by the Steins, American
expatriates in Paris. Leo and Gertrude did not so much discover the
painter as popularize him. He, in turn, did a portrait of Gertrude with
a face far from representational. When Miss Stein protested that she
didn't look like that, Picasso replied, ``But you will,'' and, indeed,
in her old age Miss Stein came to resemble her picture." --Alden Whitman
on Pablo Picasso, who died April 9, 1973 (from <http://www.nytimes.com/
learning/general/onthisday/bday/1025.html>)
%%
"I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.
%%
"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." --Robert Woodruff
%%
"In India, ``cold weather'' is merely a conventional phrase and has come
into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between
weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only
make it mushy." --Mark Twain
%%
"Sir, this is a unique dog. He does not live by tooth or fang. He
respects the right of cats to be cats although he doesn't admire them.
He turns his steps rather than disturb an earnest caterpillar. His
greatest fear is that someone will point out a rabbit and suggest that
he chase it. This is a dog of peace and tranquility." --John Steinbeck
%%
"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or
discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is
to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace."
--Milan Kundera
%%
"Anyone who creates his or her own cryptographic primitive is either a
genius or a fool. Given the genius/fool ratio for our species, the odds
aren't very good." --Bruce Schneier
%%
May you dance like no one is subject to
<http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/>.
%%
May you dance like no one is subject to
<http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/>. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is being
watched.
%%
"Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a
high powered rifle and scope." --P.J. O'Rourke
%%
"It's always work that piles up. How come fun never piles up?" --"Real
Life Adventures", 6-11-02
%%
"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of
animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated arti-
fice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his
knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in
distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic
fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err,
and err greatly. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world
older and more complicated than ours they move finished and complete,
gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained,
living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are
not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net
of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the
earth." --Henry Beston, *The Outermost House*, 1928
%%
"There are only 10 kinds of people in the world -- those who understand
binary and those who don't." --fortune(6) cookie
%%
"The only thing I remember from my near-death experience is a deep,
resonant voice saying `Get away from that light, you little bastard.'"
--fortune(6) cookie
%%
"I should have worn my protective rollerblading gear," Tom noted,
ruefully, observing his gravel laden flesh.
%%
"This is really bad road-rash," Tom noted, ruefully.
%%
"I was such a pineapple," candidate Bob lamented, dolefully.
%%
"I used to be Snow White, but I drifted." --Mae West
%%
"What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of
inelegance." --Jane Austen
%%
"The citizen who calls on government to supply him with security from
cradle to grave, thereby encouraging government spending, is a danger to
himself and his fellow citizens. If his pleas are successful, he can
lose his freedom and gain no security in exchange." --Francis A. Truslow
%%
"Notice: Your mouse has been moved. Windows will now restart so that
this change can take effect." --fortune(6) cookie
%%
"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and
the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find
the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a
healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know
even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to
have succeeded." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
%%
"To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional
questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place
us under the despotism of an oligarchy." --Thomas Jefferson
%%
"First things first--but not necessarily in that order." --The Doctor,
"Doctor Who"
%%
"Larry Wall wrote the original Perl in 1986-87, the same two successive
years he won the IOCCC. ...this was no fluke... Perl and Obfuscation are
as inseparable as, say, camels and humps." --David Lowe
%%
"The wolf is tied by subtle threads to the woods he moves through."
--Barry Lopez
%%
"When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth
and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for
a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think
of it, always." --Mahatma Gandhi
%%
"Ours is a great state, and we don't like limits of any kind. Ricky
Clunn is one of the great bass fishermen. He's a Texas young guy, and
he's a very competitive fisherman, and he talked about learning to fish
wading in the creeks behind his dad. He in his underwear went wading in
the creeks behind his father, and he said--as a fisherman he said it's
great to grow up in a country with no limits...." --George Bush, Sr.
%%
"When someone says ``I want a programming language in which I need only
say what I wish done,'' give him a lollipop." --Alan J. Perlis, Epigrams
on Programming, #93
%%
"Never let a gift horse in the house." --Trojan Malapropist
%%
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that
we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic
and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
--Theodore Roosevelt (editorial in the Kansas City Star, May 7, 1918)
%%
     It was right there on the front page of *The New York Times*, October 13,
1986. "Initial Congressional reaction tonight to the failure of President
Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev to reach agreement on nuclear arms control was
mixed. `The President did not blink,' said Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republic-
an of Indiana."
     Many of you have been wondering, I know, about the ophthalmological
machismo that has lately dominated international relations and how it came to
replace the better-known forms of *cojones* competition. For many years, my
preferred form of exercise has been rapid blinking, so I am in excellent trim
to explain all this.
     Officials began looking for new forms of testosterone testing and viril-
ity vying about six years ago. When your main man is seventy-sive, this gets a
little dicey, which is obviously why they decided to enter Reagan only in
blinking contests. They wanted to try him in competitive napping as well, but
it's not recognized by the International Olympic Committee.
     Believe me, blinking can be strenuous, so the administration introduced a
simple but far-reaching innovation that changed the objective of the game.
Instead of the traditional blinking goal--shutting the eyes faster and harder
than the competition--the Reagan administration announced that the new object
was not to blink. You don't get the same aerobic effect under the new rules,
but it has a sort of yogic elegance. Just as with yoga, in order to truly
excel at not blinking, you must begin by letting your mind become perfectly
empty. The right sport for Ronald Reagan.
     --Molly Ivins, in *The Progressive*, December 1986
%%
It was right there on the front page     they decided to enter Reagan only in
of *The New York Times*, October 13,     blinking contests. They wanted to try
1986. "Initial Congressional reaction    him in competitive napping as well,
tonight to the failure of President      but it's not recognized by the Inter-
Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev to       national Olympic Committee.
reach agreement on nuclear arms con-
trol was mixed. `The President did       Believe me, blinking can be strenuous,
not blink,' said Senator Richard G.      so the administration introduced a
Lugar, Republican of Indiana."           simple but far-reaching innovation
                                         that changed the objective of the
Many of you have been wondering, I       game. Instead of the traditional
know, about the ophthalmological         blinking goal--shutting the eyes fast-
machismo that has lately dominated       er and harder than the competition--
international relations and how it       the Reagan administration announced
came to replace the better-known         that the new object was not to blink.
forms of *cojones* competition. For      You don't get the same aerobic effect
many years, my preferred form of ex-     under the new rules, but it has a
ercise has been rapid blinking, so I     sort of yogic elegance. Just as with
am in excellent trim to explain all      yoga, in order to truly excel at not
this.                                    blinking, you must begin by letting
                                         your mind become perfectly empty. The
Officials began looking for new forms    right sport for Ronald Reagan.
of testosterone testing and virility
vying about six years ago. When your     --Molly Ivins, in *The Progressive*,
main man is seventy-sive, this gets a    December 1986
little dicey, which is obviously why
%%
"The man who treasures his friends is usually solid gold himself."
--Marjorie Holmes
%%
"In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle,
stand like a rock." --Thomas Jefferson
%%
"In my time I have seen truth that was anything under the sun but just,
and I have seen justice using tools and instruments I wouldn't want to
touch with a 10-foot fence rail." --William Faulkner
%%
"The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust
conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and
injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness
of outline." --Jacob Bronowski
%%
"What in the name of conscience will it take to pass a truly effective
gun-control law? Now is this new hour of tragedy, let us spell out our
grief in constructive action." --Lyndon Baines Johnson
%%
"No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any
man's permission when we require him to obey it. Obedience to the law
is demanded as a right; not asked as a favor." --Theodore Roosevelt
%%
"I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the
observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement." --Calvin
Coolidge
%%
"If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the
lawyers in the first place." --George Savile
%%
"Laws are like cobwebs which catch small flies, but let wasps and
hornets break through." --Jonathan Swift
%%
"Someone has tabulated that we have 35 million laws on the books to
enforce the Ten Commandments." --Bert Masterton
%%
"Mob law is the most forcible expression of an abnormal public opinion;
it shows that society is rotten to the core." --Timothy Thomas Fortune
%%
"Human law may know no distinction among men in respect of rights, but
human practice may." --Frederick Douglass
%%
"The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature,
proceed from custom." --Michel de Montaigne
%%
"Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally
true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists
on." --Robert F. Kennedy
%%
"In a democracy only those laws which have their basis in folkways
or the approval of strong groups have a chance of being enforced."
--Abraham Myerson
%%
"What do you got in place of a conscience? Don't answer. I know: a
lawyer." --Detective Story [film, 1951]
%%
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." --William
Shakespeare
%%
"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the
miseries or credulities of mankind." --Joseph Conrad
%%
"Judging from the main portion of the history of the world, so far,
justice is always in jeopardy." --Walt Whitman
%%
"Liberty is obedience to the law which one has laid down for oneself."
--Jean-Jacques Rousseau
%%
"Parents are not quite interested in justice, they are interested in
quiet." --Bill Cosby
%%
"It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason,
and justice tell me I ought to do." --Edmund Burke
%%
"However harmless a thing is, if the law forbids it most people will
think it wrong." --W. Somerset Maugham
%%
"Of course, people are getting smarter nowadays; they are letting
lawyers instead of their conscience be their guides." --Will Rogers
%%
"There is no social evil, no form of injustice whether of the feudal or
capitalist order which has not been sanctified in some way or other by
religious sentiment and thereby rendered more impervious to change."
--Reinhold Niebuhr
%%
"The humorous man recognizes that absolute purity, absolute justice,
absolute logic and perfection are beyond human achievement and that men
have been able to live happily for thousands of years in a state of
genial frailty." --Brooks Atkinson
%%
"The biggest gap in the world is the gap between the justice of a cause
and the motives of the people pushing it." --John P. Grier
%%
"Lawyers [are] operators of the toll bridge across which anyone in
search of justice has to pass." --Jane Bryant Quinn
%%
"It is with government as with medicine, its only business is the
choice of evils. Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction
of  liberty." --Jeremy Bentham
%%
"If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the
law." --Winston Churchill
%%
"The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a
crown. He must dominate in his turn." --Albert Camus
%%
"Believe in no other God than the one who insists on justice and
equality among men." --George Sand
%%
"Oh, how I love the Earth and everything in it, life and death. And men.
One can think of nothing finer, or nicer, than men ... their wars, their
concentration camps, their justice." --Marcel Ayme
%%
"The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he be-
lieves to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past
is the one who hunches the world along." --Clarence Darrow
%%
"A country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and
efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a
powerful one too powerful." --Primo Levi
%%
"Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get
out of it if we would." --Thomas Hardy
%%
"Military justice is to justice what military music is to music."
--Groucho Marx
%%
"Crime is contagious. If a government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds
contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto
himself." --Justice Louis D. Brandeis
%%
"Lawyers as a group are no more dedicated to justice or public service
than a private public utility is dedicated to giving light." --David
Melinkoff
%%
"The love of justice in most men is simply the fear of suffering
injustice." --Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
%%
"Lie detectors do not. Independent research consistently shows they are
barely better than chance at detecting lies. That is why they are not
admitted into a court of law unless both sides agree to it, and often
not then." --Deane Jordan [1001 Facts Somebody Screwed Up]
%%
"Justice is too good for some people, and not good enough for the rest."
--Norman Douglas
%%
"The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul
up there's no law against whacking them around a little." --Porterfield
%%
"Few of us have enough wisdom for justice or enough leisure for
humanity." --Rex Stout
%%
"Envy, among other ingredients, has a mixture of love of justice in it.
We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good fortune."
--William Hazlitt
%%
"Only he is free who cultivates his own thoughts ... and strives without
fear of man to do justice to them." --Berthold Auerbach
%%
"An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice
maintain -- the equality of all men." --Ignazio Silone
%%
"He had come to that time in his life (it varies for every man) when
a human being gives himself over to his demon or to his genius, accord-
ing to a mysterious law which orders him either to destroy or surpass
himself." --Marguerite Yourcenar
%%
"Common sense often makes good law." --William O. Douglas
%%
"The police must obey the law while enforcing the law." --Earl Warren
%%
"At least in the law of the jungle, you've survival of the fittest. In
Congress, you've just got survival." --Robert W. Packwood
%%
"There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of
law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets
the truth." --Jean Giraudoux
%%
"There is no American right to loot stores, or to burn buildings, or to
fire rifles from the rooftops. That is crime -- and crime must be dealt
with forcefully and swiftly, and certainly -- under the law." --Lyndon
Baines Johnson
%%
"We live in a stage of politics, where legislators seem to regard
passage of laws as much more important than the results of their
enforcement." --William Howard Taft
%%
"My daddy is a movie actor, and sometimes he plays the good guy, and
sometimes he plays the lawyer." --Malcolm Ford
%%
"There is no ideal time for the consolidation of companies' legisla-
tion. Company law is not static, and if consolidation were to wait until
all the measures in the pipeline at that time were enacted it would be
delayed almost indefinitely." --Lord Lucas
%%
"There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and
actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life."
--Montaigne
%%
"Let all the laws be clear, uniform and precise; to interpret laws is
always almost to corrupt them." --Voltaire
%%
"The law, as manipulated by clever and highly respected rascals,
still remains the best avenue for a career of honorable and leisurely
plunder." --Gabriel Chevallier
%%
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
--Anatole France [Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault]
%%
"A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better
lawyer." --Robert Frost
%%
"When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers ... we are ripping the
foundations of justice from beneath new generations." --Alexander I.
Solzhenitsyn
%%
"The world's history is constant, like the laws of nature, and simple,
like the souls of men. The same conditions continually produce the same
results." --Friedrich von Schiller
%%
"Justice was born outside the home and a long way from it; and it has
never been adopted there." --Walter Cronkite
%%
"Each man is his own absolute lawgiver and dispenser of glory or
gloom to himself, the maker of his life, his reward, his punishment."
--unattributed
%%
"One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect
itself with thick armor is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the
species is on the road to extinction." --John Steinbeck
%%
"The Family of Man is more than three billion strong. It lives in
more than one hundred nations. Most of its members are not white. Most
of them are not Christians. Most of them know nothing about free enter-
prise, or the process of law, or the Australian ballot." --John F.
Kennedy
%%
"In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is
learning to tolerate fools." --Doris Lessing
%%
"In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever
brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt,
as injustice." --Charles Dickens
%%
"Deceive not thy physician, confessor, nor lawyer." --George Herbert
%%
"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's incli-
nation to injustice makes democracy necessary." --Reinhold Niebuhr
%%
"If we were all to be judged by our thoughts, the hills would be
swarming with outlaws." --Johann Sigurjonsson
%%
"It is better to be a mouse in a cat's mouth than a man in a lawyer's
hands." --Spanish proverb
%%
"Our destiny rules over us, even when we are not yet aware of it; it is
the future that makes laws for us today." --Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
%%
"Maturity is the ability to do a job whether or not you are super-
vised, to carry money without spending it and to bear an injustice
without wanting to get even." --Ann Landers
%%
"Among the attributes of God, although they are all equal, mercy shines
with even more brilliancy than justice. ~ Miguel de Cervantes
%%
"The chessboard is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the
universe; the rules of the game are what we call the Laws of Nature.
The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play
is always fair, just and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that
he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for
ignorance." --Thomas Huxley
%%
"Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but
because 'tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to
confute him." --John Selden
%%
"It's a good thing justice is blind; she might not like some of the
things done in her name if she could see them." --Joe Moore
%%
"Litigation: A form of hell whereby money is transferred from the
pockets of the proletariat to that of lawyers." --Frank McKinney ["Kin"]
Hubbard
%%
"Lawyers spend a great deal of time shoveling smoke." --Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr.
%%
"There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law."
--Abraham Lincoln
%%
"Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the
human mind." --Thomas Jefferson
%%
"The Constitution of the United States is not a mere lawyers' document;
it is a vehicle of life, and its spirit is always the spirit of the
age." --Woodrow Wilson
%%
"With Congress, every time they make a joke it's a law, and every time
they make a law it's a joke." --Will Rogers
%%
"A lawyer is someone who helps you get what is coming to him."
--unattributed
%%
"Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our
property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our
wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our
power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honor false in all its
points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons." --George
Bernard Shaw
%%
"True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere
else." --Clarence Darrow
%%
"There is a point beyond which even justice becomes unjust." --Sophocles
[Electra]
%%
"Sharp lawyers are running wild. Doctors are afraid to practice
medicine. And some moms and pops won't even coach Little League any
more. We must sue each other less -- and care for each other more."
--George Herbert Walker Bush
%%
"Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed."
--Benjamin Franklin
%%
"Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized
medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the ty-
ranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling."
--Felix Frankfurter
%%
"There are three reasons why lawyers are replacing rats as laboratory
research animals. One is that they're plentiful, another is that lab
assistants don't get attached to them, and the third is that there are
some things rats just won't do." --Unattributed
%%
"That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice
of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the
oppres- sions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real, only proves
their apathy and deeper degradation." --Elizabeth Cady Stanton
%%
"He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers
it." --Plato
%%
"The danger of success is that it makes us forget the world's dreadful
injustice." --Jules Renard
%%
"... a strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the
high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of
necessity, or self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger,
are of higher obligation." --Thomas Jefferson
%%
"There are not enough jails, not enough policemen, not enough courts to
enforce a law not supported by the people." --Hubert H. Humphrey
%%
"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men
of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be
read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood." --Alexander
Hamilton [The Federalist]
%%
"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a
disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice." --Benedict de Spinoza
%%
"Corn can't expect justice from a court composed of chickens." --African
proverb
%%
"A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers." --H.L.
Mencken
%%
"I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and
liberality." --George Washington
%%
"Two farmers each claimed to own a certain cow. While one pulled on its
head and the other pulled on its tail, the cow was milked by a lawyer.
--Jewish parable
%%
"Justice, though due to the accused, is due to the accuser too."
--Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo
%%
"Divorce is a game played by lawyers." --Cary Grant
%%
"We must reject the idea that every time a law is broken, society is
guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American
precept that each individual is accountable for his actions." --Ronald
Reagan
%%
"When I hear any man talk of unalterable law, the only effect it
produces on me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool."
--Sydney Smith
%%
"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's
whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization
is the process of setting man free from men." --Ayn Rand [The
Fountainhead]
%%
"[Predictions for the next millennium:] Less fanaticism. More compassion
for children. More solidarity with victims of illness and injustice."
--Elie Wiesel
%%
"When one reflects that half a dozen Presidents in this century have
been targets of assassination attempts, the notion that we have been a
great virtuous country of law and order is hard to sustain." --Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr.
%%
"I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not
desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right."
--Henry David Thoreau
%%
"[Lawyers] ... men that hire out words and anger." --Martial
%%
"One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's
ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
%%
"All beauteous things for which we live By laws of space and time decay.
But Oh, the very reason why I clasp them, is because they die."
--William Cory
%%
"Law is a bottomless pit." --John Arbuthnot
%%
"Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers." --Erik Pepke
%%
"[On Richard Nixon:] I personally think that he did violate the law,
that he committed impeachable offenses. But I don't think that he thinks
he did." --James Earl Carter
%%
"Concepts such as truth, justice, compassion are often the only bulwarks
which stand against ruthless power." --Aung San Suu Kyi
%%
"The worst evil of disregard for some law is that it destroys respect
for all law." --Herbert Clark Hoover
%%
"Law school taught me one thing: how to take two situations that are
exactly the same and show how they are different." --Hart Pomerantz
%%
"Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human
happiness or a quiet conscience." --Sir Isaiah Berlin
%%
"Careers, like rockets, don't always take off on schedule. The key is to
keep working on the engines." --Gary Sinise
%%
"Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for
what you want." --Joseph Wood Krutch
%%
    "How are you getting on with that memory training course you got by
correspondence, Mulla?"
     "I'm improving. Now I can sometimes remember that I have forgotten
     something."

--from *The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin* by Idries Shah
%%
    Mulla Nasrudin was very ill, and everyone thought that he was going
to die.
    His wife dressed in mourning clothes and started to weep and wail.
Mulla Nasrudin alone was unperturbed.
    "Mulla," asked one of his disciples, "how is it that you can face
death with such calm, even laughing from time to time, while we who are
not going to die are in torment lest you leave us?"
    "Quite simple," said Nasrudin. "As I lie here looking at the lot of
you, I say to myself, `They all look so terrible that I am almost sure
the angel of Death will mistake at least one of them for his prey when
he comes visiting -- and leave old Nasrudin here a while longer...'"

--from *The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin* by Idries Shah
%%
    "They have an interesting custom in England," said Nasrudin, "and it
is one that I would like to copy."
    "What is that?"
    "Businessmen take their secretaries to Paris and pretend that they
are their wives."
    "But you haven't got a secretary!"
    "I have thought of that. All I have to do is to take my wife to
Paris and say that she is my secretary."

--from *The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin* by Idries Shah
%%
    Nasrudin moved into a new house. The postman called and said:
    "I hope that you are satisfied with the mail deliveries."
    "More than satisfied," said Nasrudin, "and, in fact, from tomorrow
you may double my order."

--from *The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin* by Idries Shah
%%
    Nasrudin opened a lecture agency. He knew so many people who felt
that they had something interesting to say. Why not become their agent?
    The ones who felt that they were interesting, however, were not
usually interesting people. He got many complaints.
    "Next time I shall make sure," he said.
    One day a telegram arrived from a study society:
        PLEASE SUPPLY A WIT TO 
        ADDRESS OUR GROUP ON SUNDAY. 
    "This time I can make sure," said the Mulla. He sent two of his
lecturers, and replied by telegram:
        WITS DIFFICULT TO FIND SO HAVE 
        SENT TWO HALF-WITS INSTEAD.

--from *The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin* by Idries Shah
%%
Someone told Mulla Nasrudin that he should be as concerned about the
welfare of others as he was about his own. Accordingly the next time he
swallowed a mouthful of hot soup, he rushed out into the village street,
crying, "Beware, beware, my stomach is on fire!" --from *The Subtbleties
of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin* by Idries Shah
%%
    "Mulla, your donkey has disappeared."
    "Thank goodness I wasn't on it at the time, otherwise I would have
disappeared too!"

--from *The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin* by Idries Shah
%%
    Mulla Nasrudin was walking through the streets at midnight.
    The watchman asked, "What are you doing out so late, Mulla?"
    "My sleep has disappeared and I am looking for it."

--from *The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin* by Idries Shah
%%
    When Mulla Nasrudin arrived at the immigration barrier in London, the
officer in charge asked, "Where are you from?"
    Nasrudin said: "Grrrr... The East."
    "Name?"
    "Mulla, sssssss, Nasrrrrgrrudin!"
    "Have you an impediment in your speech?"
    "Wheee-eee -- no!"
    "Then why do you talk like that?"
    "Pip-pip-pip -- I grr -- learnt it from English By Radio!"

--from *The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin* by Idries Shah
%%
/----------------------------------------------------------------------\
|                                                                      |
|     When Mulla Nasrudin  arrived    your speech?"                    |
| at  the  immigration  barrier in        "Wheee-eee -- no!"           |
| London, the  officer  in  charge        "Then  why  do you talk like |
| asked, "Where are you from?"        that?"                           |
|     Nasrudin said: "Grrrr... The        "Pip-pip-pip  --  I  grr  -- |
| East."                              learnt   it   from  'English  By |
|     "Name?"                         Radio'!"                         |
|     "M u l l a,   s s s s s s s,    --from  _The  Subtleties  of the |
| Nasrrrrgrrudin!"                    Inimitable  Mulla  Nasrudin*  by |
|     "Have you an  impediment  in    Idries Shah                      |
|                                                                      |
\----------------------------------------------------------------------/
%%
    Mulla Nasrudin went to a donkey market.
    "Are you in the market for donkeys?" a merchant asked him.
    "Yes," said Nasrudin.
    "What about one of these remarkably handsome beasts?"
    "Just a minute," said the Mulla, "I want you to show me the worst
donkeys you have."
    "Those are the worst."
    "Very well, then, I'll take the rest."

--from *The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin* by Idries Shah
%%
    A man got into conversation with Nasrudin, standing outside a shop.
Nasrudin had a lot of stubble on his face. The man asked, "How often do
you shave?"
   "Twenty or thirty times a day," said the Mulla.
   "You must be a freak!"
   "No, I'm only a barber."

--from *The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin* by Idries Shah
%%
    Something frightened Mulla Nasrudin as he was walking down a road.
He threw himself into a ditch and then began to think that he had been
frightened to death. After a time he became very cold and hungry. He
walked home and told his wife the sad news, and went back to his ditch.
His wife, sobbing bitterly, went to the neighbours for comfort. "My
husband is dead, lying in a ditch."
    "How do you know?"
    "There was nobody to see him, so he had to come and tell me himself,
poor dear."

--from *The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin* by Idries Shah
%%
A neighbour came to Nasrudin, asking to borrow his donkey. "It is out on
loan," the teacher replied. At that moment, the donkey brayed loudly
inside the stable. "But I can hear it bray, over there." "Whom do you
believe," asked Nasrudin, "me or a donkey?"
%%
    A neighbour came to Nasrudin, asking to borrow his donkey.
    "It is out on loan," the teacher replied. At that moment, the donkey
brayed loudly inside the stable. 
    "But I can hear it bray, over there."
    "Whom do you believe," asked Nasrudin, "me or a donkey?"
%%
    Nasrudin walked into a teahouse and declaimed, "The moon is more
useful than the sun."
    "Why?" he was asked.
    "Because at night we need the light more."
%%
Nasrudin was carrying home a piece of liver and the recipe for liver
pie. Suddenly a bird of prey swooped down and snatched the piece of meat
from his hand. As the bird flew off, Nasrudin called after it, "Foolish
bird! You have the liver, but what can you do with it without the
recipe?"
%%
Two men came before Nasrudin when he was magistrate. The first man said,
"This man has bitten my ear -- I demand compensation." The second man
said, "He bit it himself." Nasrudin withdrew to his chambers, and spent
an hour trying to bite his own ear. He succeeded only in falling over
and bruising his forehead. Returning to the courtroom, Nasrudin pro-
nounced, "Examine the man whose ear was bitten. If his forehead is
bruised, he did it himself and the case is dismissed. If his forehead is
not bruised, the other man did it and must pay three silver pieces."
%%
    A guide was taking a party round the British Museum. "This
sarcophagus is five thousand years old."
    A bearded figure with a turban stepped forward. "You are mistaken,"
said Nasrudin, "for it is five thousand and three years old." Everyone
was impressed, and the guide was not pleased. They passed into another
room.
    "This vase", said the guide, "is two thousand five hundred years
old."
    "Two thousand five hundred and three," intoned Nasrudin.
    "Now look here," said the guide, "how can you date things so
precisely? I don't care if you do come from the East, people just don't
know things like that."
    "Simple," said Nasrudin. "I was last here three years ago. That time
you said the vase was two thousand five hundred years old."
%%
"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them,
and pretty soon you have a dozen." --John Steinbeck
%%
"The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just
skimming off a tiny bit of it." --Neal Stephenson, *Snow Crash*
%%
"For when the wine is in, the wit is out." --Thomas Becon
%%
"A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine
lover." --Clifton Fadiman
%%
"One not only drinks wine, one smells it, observes it, tastes it, sips
it and--one talks about it." --King Edward VII
%%
"Real programmers never die, they are simply cast into (void*)."
--anonymous
%%
"You hear all the time about how bad X is, but when you ask what exactly
is wrong with X, you get nothing but--silence." "X11 is old and
therefore needs to be replaced--much like the wheel."
%%
"As you ramble through life, brother, no matter what your goal, keep
your eye upon the doughnut, and not upon the hole." --Dr. Murray Banks,
quoting a menu
%%
"The church is near but the road is icy; the bar is far away but I will
walk carefully." --Russian proverb
%%
"Now and then an innocent person is sent to the legislature."
--fortune(6)
%%
"Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car,
in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing
right in your ear." --Dave Barry
%%
"Stupidity got us into this mess--why can't it get us out?"
%%
"Niklaus Wirth has lamented that, whereas Europeans pronounce his name
correctly (Ni-klows Virt), Americans invariably mangle it into (Nick-les
Worth). Which is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans
call him by value."
%%
"By doing just a little every day, you can gradually let the task
completely overwhelm you."
%%
"As far as we know,