Me, about to leave the bathroom, but then turning around after a sudden worry:
I think I forget to hit RETURN.
Clifford Truesdell, reviewing a paper:
This paper gives wrong solutions to trivial problems. The basic error, however, is not new.(Mathematical Reviews, Volume 12, page 561.)
Charles De Gaulle:
The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.
Carrie Ameen, a cancer survivor, or an actor playing one, in a gushy television ad for "America's pharmaceutical companies":
Ten years ago I might not be sitting here today.
Lee Dreyfus, a former governor of Wisconsin:
Madison, Wisconsin, is fifty-two square miles surrounded by reality.
Winston Churchill, after noting that Neville Chamberlain was a modest man:
He has much to be modest about!
George W Bush:
It makes no sense to replace someone who's on the Appropriations Committee with someone who is not!
The motto on a pillow on Alice Longworth Roosevelt's couch:
If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me!
Michelle Kwan's skating costume's subliminal message, according to the New Yorker, as quoted in an article in the New York Times:
I am going to make my First Communion, and I intend to yodel.
An uncredited constructor of the local television guide:
Tonight we have the great Ring trilogy: Rocky I, Rocky II, and Rocky III.
H L Mencken:
SELF RESPECT: The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
Doctor Samuel Johnson:
Much may be made of a Scotsman, if he is caught young.
The best line from the movie version of "The Fellowship of the Ring":
No one tosses a dwarf!
Todd Robbins, a New York magician who sometimes does his own blockhead act, quoted in the New York Times obituary for Melvin Burkhart, "the Human Blockhead", 18 November 2001:
Anyone who has ever hammered a nail into his nose owes a large debt to Melvin Burkhart.
Me, on a bad day:
Reading fussy modern programs with declarations like object object object or Line line LINE , I miss the days when using variable names like IP1 or XMAX would get you called verbose and eccentric.
E. F. Benson, in "Queen Lucia":
With regard to religion, finally, it may be briefly said that she believed in God in much the same way as she believed in Australia...
Helmut Kopka and Patrick Daly, in A Guide to Latex2E, I guess without a trace of irony:
In the original version of Latex, there are several English words such as Figure and Bibliography included explicitly in certain commands. This in fact violates the rules of good programming which forbid doing anything explicitly.
Macbeth (as reported by Shakespeare):
Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?
Crusty Australian art critic and unreliable driver Robert Hughes:
It's true that the unexamined life is not worth living, but then the unlived life is not worth examining.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who headed IBM's shift from traditional big-iron somputer to systems using arrays of processors, on the fact that hardware advances have far outpaced software:
All those Porsches and nowhere to drive.
A protest sign displayed during the Florida presidential recount:
"Manual Count" Means Manipulation!
Maurice Wilkes, after the first attempts to write programs for the EDSAC computer:
I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
Governor Earl Long reflected:
I want to be buried in Louisiana, so I can stay active in politics.
Referring to the gaudy, grandiose, ostentatious buildings that Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen has splattered around Seattle, a critic remarked:
We'll look back on this as the era when money was too cheap to meter.
A Montenegrin, interviewed in connection with an article about Montenegro's efforts to separate from Serbia:
Of course we are better than those damn Serbs. Our alphabet has four more letters!
Alan Perlis:
When we write programs that learn, it turns out that we do and they don't.
In a book about Great Britain's tortuous tango with European integration, a picture of Prime Minister John Major is dryly captioned:
My hesitation is final.
Paul Halmos:
Mathematics isn't in a hurry. Efficiency is meaningless. Understanding is what counts. So is the computer important to mathematics? My answer is no. It is important, but not to mathematics.
David Ervine, leader of the Progressive Unionist Party, commenting after the latest collapse of a peace plan in Northern Ireland:
Northern Ireland is the only place I know where someone will drive 100 miles out of his way just to receive an insult.
Computational neuroscientist Greg Hood, after refusing to eat a suspiciously shiny sweet with a metallic glazing that Anjana Kar had brought back from India, going to his car, retrieving his digital volt/ohmmeter, and performing diagnostics:
Never eat a cookie with a resistance of less than 1 ohm.
Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, who presented a computer-aided proof of the Four Color Theorem:
When proofs are long and highly computational, it may be argued that even when hand checking is possible, the probability of human error is considerably higher than that of machine error.
The chef at G's, (or is it Charlie's?) in Oakland, Pittsburgh:
With enough cayenne pepper, anybody can make a hot sauce, just like anybody can punch you in the face. But with my hot sauce, you're going to ask me to punch you in the face again.
Cynthia Van Ness, of Buffalo, New York, in a letter appearing in the May-June 1998 issue of The Utne Reader:
Why do carnivores always bring up Hitler when they talk about vegetarians? What are the moral implications of their rhetorical dependence on someone they profess to despise?
Eugene Wigner, asked to confirm an anecdote about him, in which he got into a fight with a taxi driver over a tip, and then told him "Oh, go to hell, please!", responded:
Of course the story is true. But you must understand: That driver was very impolite!
On a T-shirt:
If a man speaks in a forest, and there's no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?
An anonymous senior official of the National Security Agency:
The NSA is a self-licking ice cream cone.
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