Here is a collection of quotes that have struck a thought with me. Whenever I hear a quote that makes me think I write it down, then post it here!
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."
- Plato
Socrates was concerned less with knowing the right answers than with the strenuous attempt to discover those answers.
- The Passion of the Western Mind
The life not tested by criticism is not worth living.
- Socrates
If people believe in their society, they don't break its rules.
- Patriot Games by Tom Clancy
The web has the potential allow the people unprecidented access to their elected leaders. email's can be sent to politicians, companies, local leaders, anyone at all and at any time of day.
- "Protesting in a Cyberdemocracy"
If PRO is the opposite of CON what is the opposite of PROGRESS?
- Paul Harvey
About 130 miles from Las Vegas, at Mile Marker LN 29.5 on remote Nevada Highway 375, is a lone mailbox used by a local rancher.
What Company Is This?
It has a little over 500 employees with the following statistics:
* 29 have been accused of spousal abuse
* 7 have been arrested for fraud
* 19 have been accused of writing bad checks
* 117 have bankrupted at least two businesses
* 3 have been arrested for assault
* 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
* 14 have been arrested on drug related charges
* 8 have been arrested for shoplifting
* 21 are current defendants in lawsuits
* In 1998 alone, 84 were stopped for drunk driving
Can you guess which organization this is? Give up?
It's the 535 members of your United States Congress... the same group that perpetually cranks out hundreds of new laws designed to keep the rest of us in line and talks incessantly about 'Family Values'.
Our best defense is knowledge.
- Tuvoc, Star Trek Voyager
When I was young, I accepted it without question.
- Tuvoc, Star Trek Voyager
Failure isn't falling down ... it's staying down.
- Jack & Jill by James Patterson
Seventy percent of Americans get nearly one hundred percent of their information from television and the movies.
- Jack & Jill by James Patterson
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke
The probability of success is difficult to estimate, but if we never search, the chance of success is zero.
- Phillip Morrison
Running away makes a circle.
- Laura Thompson
When you give your children wisdom, you do not tell them what to know, or what is true, but rather how to get to their own truth.
- Conversations with God
Knowledge is the only hope this planet has for survival.
- Dick Solomon - 3rd Rock From the Sun
The creation of a maximum security society does not come overnight.
- Discovery Channel - Big Brother
The radius of the orbit of an electron is approximately 25,000 times that of the basic constituents of the atom. This is approximately equivalent to a sphere the size of a dime revolving about another sphere of the same size more than a quarter of a mile away.
- Unknown Source
There are things that the governments of the world cover up, these operations are always denied and are usually succesful at being covered up. There are a few people among us who devote their lives to exposing the vile corruptness and incessant d isinformation spewed by our loving government. Those people use minor clues to draw conclusions which are sometime right, sometimes wrong. But you can be assured that every story they report, every conspiracy they concoct is based in reality. All we ask i s that you read what we say, and think about what you view as truth and what as lie. Just think about what you see -- the government is not allways right, especially the military.
- Unknown Source
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
All you will ever be you are now becoming.
- Guest on Oprah - Nov.2.1999
Hold your thumb out at arms length. In the patch of sky covered by your thumb the Keck Observatory can see over 250,000 galaxies.
- Discovery Channel - Discovery News
The length of the 747-100 is half as long as the Wright brothers first flight.
- Discovery Channel - Inside the 747
The Desert Gecko licks it's eyelidless eyes to keep them clean.
- Discovery Channel - Wild Treasures of the East
Bertrand thought it ironic that the human tendency towards self-destruction was the only thing that kept the visitors at bay.
- Forbidden Summit by Payne Harrison
By the early 1900s, the Supreme Court had overturned 141 acts of Congress, plus 919 state laws and 105 local laws.
- A Delicate Balance by Paul C. Light
No government has jurisdiction over the truth.
- Fox Moulder
In the end, the rating system is only as effective as the parents who use it. ... To make the system work, parents will have to read the TV listings or watch the programs with their children. But if more parents had been willing to do that, th ere probably would have been no demand for the V-Chip in the first place.
- A Delicate Balance by Paul C. Light
Liberals would never choose to listen to conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh, for example. But assuming they stumbled on his program in the middle of the desert with nothing else on the radio, they might make fun of everything he said, and most ce rtainly would forget anything they found potentially persuasive as soon as possible.
- A Delicate Balance by Paul C. Light
We’ve got a situation where most human beings on the planet have their nervous systems augmented -- to the extent that I can sit in this hotel room and watch something happening in Tokyo as it happens, by virtue of these systems that my species h as created.
- William Gibson, Interview
Thre are those who would tell us that we can't afford to establish a permanent presence on the Moon. They are the descendants of Isabella's advisors, who thought Europe could not afford to open up the Atlantic.
Moonfall by Jack McDevitt
How about an IP-embedded plaid shirt that automatically matches pants to top?
- Wired News Sept.2.99
Everyone has a different vision of a perfect world.
- Unknown
You can make what you want to out of prison. Some people sit around and do dope all day. Others immerse themselves in a routine of work and exercise. I studied technology and music. Regardless, prisons are no longer a place of rehabilitation. They serve only to punish and conditions are only going to worsen. The effect is that angry, uneducated, and unproductive inmates are being released back into society.
- Phrack Magazine Issue 52-5
Whatever happened to getting off on a technicality? I'm sorry to say those days are gone, left only to the movies. The courts generally dismiss many arguments as "harmless error" or "the government acted in good faith".
The most alarming trend, and surely the root of the prosecutions success, are the liberally worded conspiracy laws. Quite simply, if two or more people plan to do something illegal, then one of them does something in furtherance of the objective (e ven something legal), then it's a crime. Yes, it's true.
In America it's illegal to simply talk about committing a crime. Paging Mr. Orwell. Hello?
- Phrack Magazine Issue 52-5
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitler
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
- Albert Einstein
"It bugs him that he can buy a handgun, a right he enthusiastically supports, but not a lawn dart toy banned by the government because it could hurt children."
- Article about Jesse Ventura
"Those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it."
- Unknown
"The fact is is that the universe is going to stop expanding and it is going to collapse in on itself. We've got to do something before it's too late." "How much time do we have left?" "Sixty trillion years, seventy at the most."
- Character on a Star Trek DS9 episode.
"When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun.
Now they've taken the first amendment, and I can say nothing about it."
- Unknown
- Thinking about the future
"Today there are over 5 billion humans on the planet, and more are on the way. Each person has the potential to create and share with the world an idea or invention that will change the course of history.
"However, this will not happen unless we encourage our children, who are the people of the next millenium, to think expansively and offer their thoughts to others."
- Isaac Asimov
After the explosion, people learned to write left handed, to tie just one shoe.
To learn to endure the pieces of metal and glass embedded in their flesh.
To smile with faces that made them want to cry.
To cry with glass eyes.
They learn, in homes where children had played, to stand the quiet.
They learn to sleep with pills.
To sleep alone.
- NY Times, Rick Bragg, following Oklahoma City Bombing
Beer, the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
- Homer Simpson
On March 18, 1996, Time published an article titled "I'VE BEEN SPAMMED!" The story concerned a list-linking incident involving the President of the United States, two well-known hacking magazines, and a senior editor at Time. Apparently, a member of Time's staff was list-linked to approximately 1,800 lists. Reportedly, the mail amounted to some 16MB. It was reported that House Leader Newt Gingrich had also been linked to the lists. Gingrich, like nearly all members of Congress, had an auto-answer script on his e-mail address. These trap e-mail addresses contained in incoming messages and send automated responses. (Congressional members usually send a somewhat generic response, such as "I will get back to you as soon as possible and appreciate you r support.") Thus, Gingrich's auto-responder received and replied to each and every message. This only increased the number of messages he would receive, because for each time he responded to a mailing list message, his response would be appended to the o utgoing messages of the mailing list. In effect, the Speaker of the House was e-mail bombing himself.
- ~kronvold/Hacker/docs/v0000009.htm
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in a final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and are not clothed.
- President Eisenhower
There are more than a thousand million men and women in the world who cannot read or write or do the simplest sums. Their illiteracy helps all too powerfully to keep them poor. It prevents the rural proletariat from learning and applying the kn own agriculteral techniques which would double their crops and change heir lives. Illiteracy bars their path to social, culteral and political progress.
Yet if UNESCO were given a fund of $200 million for a worldwide literacy campain, it could free every nation from this evil handicap. $200 million is approximately the price of two strategic bombers of the latest type. The nations of the Third Wor ld suffer greivously from diseases which have disapeared from the "develeoped" West. Malaria still kills great numbers, and weakens millions more so that their producctive output is reduced. Trachoma is very simple to cure, but, if untreated, it makes t he victim blind, his life a burden to himself, and a burden to society. Leprosy makes its victims segregated social outcasts. Yaws, a diet deficiency disease, covers the body with running sores, makes a man unfit for work or play, and allows him no real rest.
These four diseases impose a heavy load of exonomic loss and human suffering in the Third World. Yet all of them alre easily preventable. The World health Organisation could eliminate them -- wipe them out now and for the future -- for an expendit ure of $500 million -- about the cost of an aircraft carrier.
- Unknown
You know there are four hundred billion stars out there just in our galaxy alone. And if only one in a million of those had planets. And if only one in a million of those had life. And if only one of a million of those had intelligent life, there would still be literally millions of civilizations out there.
- Unknown
Who's the more foolish ... the fool or the fool who follows him?
- Obi-Wan Kenobi
Fear is the path to the dark side.
Fear leads to anger.
Anger leads to hate.
Hate leads to suffering.
- Yoda
The Earth is brighter than the sun in the radio spectrum.
- Dan Werthimer, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory
Adult flies live entirely on sugar.
- The Learning Channel
If the future is written then why bother doing anything? - Fox Moulder
The future is not written. Our lives are what we make with them.
Great men do not seek power, they have power thrust upon them
- Kahless, first emperor of the Klingon Empire
With the 64 bit address lines the Merced will be able to use one million terrabytes of address space, enough to run the Enterprise Holodeck.
- Ace's Hardware
It takes the sun and its family of planets 226 million years to circle the center of its home galaxy.
- Mark Reid, Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer
The sun is one of about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, one of billions of ordinary galaxies in the universe. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, with curving arms of stars pinwheeling out from a center. The solar system is about half way out o n one of these arms and is about 26,000 light years away from the center. A light year is about 6 trillion miles.
- MSNBC Space News
The Earth rotates on its axis at about 1,100 miles an hour, a motion that creates day and night. The Earth orbits the sun at about 67,000 miles an hour, a motion that takes one year. The sun circles the Milky Way at a speed of about 486,000 miles per hour. And the Milky Way, along with every other galaxy, is moving away from each other, as the universe expands at a constantly accelerating rate.
- MSNBC Space News
From the age of 11, the chance of death doubles every 8 years.
- PBS Special, Stealing Time: The New Science of Aging
If it isn't supposed to plug in there, why does it fit?
- Tech Tales
One of our greatest freedoms is the freedom from fear.
- The Seige
The first rule of government contracting - why build one when you can build two at twice the price?
- Contact
Mourning the loss of a friend and teacher was both fitting and honorable, but to dwell unnecessarily on that loss was to give the past too much power over the present.
- Luke Skywalker (Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn)
X-Wing fighters can travel at 26,298 times the speed of light! Star destroyers and the Falcon can go even faster!
- calculated from (10 minutes = .5 light year @ .4) from Heir to the Empire
At one end of the beer can was the heart of the Hubble - its 94-inch reflective mirror. Although smaller than Mount Palomar's 200-inch reflector, it was a great deal more precise. To illustrate its precision: if the Hubble's 94-inch mirror were enlarged to a disk three thousand miles in diameter, its largest imperfection would be four inches high.
- Storming Intrepid by Payne Harrison
