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View Full Version : I feel the need for whimsically amusing quotes



matthew
December 10th, 2005, 03:06 AM
Disclaimer: I don't necessarily agree with all of them, but they all made me laugh.

Please add to the list your favorite quote, preferably short, whimsical and yet revealing.
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Last week, I stated this woman was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. I have since been visited by her sister, and now wish to withdraw that statement.
- Mark Twain

The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending; and to have the two as close together as possible.
- George Burns

Santa Claus has the right idea. Visit people only once a year.
- Victor Borge

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
- Mark Twain

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.
- Mark Twain

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
- Socrates

The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness and kindness, can be trained to do most things.
- Jilly Cooper

I have never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back.
- Zsa Zsa Gabor

Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat.
- Alex Levine

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
- Mark Twain

Money can't buy you happiness... but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.
- Spike Milligan

What's the use of happiness? It can't buy you money.
- Henny Youngman

I am opposed to millionaires... but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.
- Mark Twain

Until I was thirteen, I thought my name was shut up.
- Joe Namath

Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.
- Herbert Henry Asquith

I don't feel old. I don't feel anything until noon. Then it's time for my nap.
- Bob Hope

I never drink water because of the disgusting things that fish do in it
-WC. Fields

We could certainly slow the aging process down if it had to work its way through Congress.
- Will Rogers

Lovechild
December 10th, 2005, 03:13 AM
An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind
- Gandhi

mcmuffy
December 10th, 2005, 03:52 AM
AIDS is a disease that is hard to talk about. The ideal thing would be to have a 100 percent effective AIDS vaccine.
Bill Gates

As you improve health in a society, population growth goes down. You know, I thought it was... before I learned about it, I thought it was paradoxical.
Bill Gates

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.
Bill Gates

Capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it's really let us down.
Bill Gates

DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.
Bill Gates

Hey, I never told anyone to buy my stock! Besides, no one is less happy than I am with the performance of Microsoft stock! I've lost tens of billions of dollars this year-if you check, you'll see that that's more than most people make in a lifetime!
Bill Gates

I actually thought that it would be a little confusing during the same period of your life to be in one meeting when you're trying to make money, and then go to another meeting where you're giving it away.
Bill Gates

I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.
Bill Gates

I do think this next century, hopefully, will be about a more global view. Where you don't just think, yes my country is doing well, but you think about the world at large.
Bill Gates

I don't think there's anything unique about human intellience. All the nuerons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion.
Bill Gates

I have 100 billion dollars... You realize I could spend 3 million dollars a day, every day, for the next 100 years? And that's if I don't make another dime. Tell you what-I'll buy your right arm for a million dollars. I give you a million bucks, and I get to sever your arm right here.
Bill Gates

I have drifted away from thinking about these philanthropic things. And it was only as the wealth got large enough and Melinda and I had talked about the view that that wealth wasn't something that would be good to just pass to the children.
Bill Gates

I mean, if we said right now, there's somebody in the next room who's dying, let's all go save their life, you know, everybody would just get up immediately and go get involved in that.
Bill Gates

I think blogging is super-important, and we've got to do a lot more software. The phenomena for us is we've got in beta this MSN Spaces thing, and it lets you leverage everything you do around Messenger - that's your buddy lists and those relationships - to set up blogs, and who has access, and who gets notified.
Bill Gates

I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.
Bill Gates

I think there certainly was a milestone in the '90s with regards to the Internet achieving critical mass. There were several magical factors that came together: the creation of HTML by Tim Berners-Lee, the drop in the price of communications, and all the PCs out there that you could put this software into.
Bill Gates

I'm not, you know, particularly good at this. Maybe I'll never be good at it. But to walk around to each patient and ask, you know, what is your problem? And be respectful of, you know, their desire for privacy. But I think it is very important. If people got out like that, you know these problems would get addressed.
Bill Gates

I'm sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn't on our radar screen. We were just making great software.
Bill Gates

In the decade ahead I can predict that we will provide over twice the productivity improvement that we provided in the '90s.
Bill Gates

Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.
Bill Gates

Is the rich world aware of how four billion of the six billion live? If we were aware, we would want to help out, we'd want to get involved.
Bill Gates

It's been shown that most people download viruses unwittingly - they don't know they're doing it until it's too late. That's what I mean here. We're talking about protecting the consumer.
Bill Gates

It's not easy to remember, but IBM was the computer industry when I was growing up. You loved 'em. You hated 'em. You knew what they were doing. They had set a standard for mainframes. They also set a standard for great sales focus and heavy product R & D.
Bill Gates

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
Bill Gates

Let's face it, the average computer user has the brain of a Spider Monkey.
Bill Gates

Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so exciting.
Bill Gates

Microsoft is not about greed. It's about innovation and fairness.
Bill Gates

Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they're not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.
Bill Gates

People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines... There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.
Bill Gates

People everywhere love Windows.
Bill Gates

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers - organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative - if we don't solve these security problems, then people will hold back.
Bill Gates

Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.
Bill Gates

So we do software for watches, for phones, for TV sets, for cars. And some of these take a long time to catch on.
Bill Gates

Some people read off of their Palms and Pocket PCs, but the real immersible reading experience takes a full-screen device.
Bill Gates

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.
Bill Gates

The browser space that we are in we have about 90 percent. Sure, Firefox has come along, and the press love the idea of that. Our commitment is to keep our browser that competes with Firefox to be the best browser - best in security, best in features.
Bill Gates

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
Bill Gates

The huge turnout for Live 8 here and around the world proves that thanks to the leadership from people like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown the world is beginning to demand more action on global health and poverty.
Bill Gates

The Internet will help achieve "friction free capitalism" by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.
Bill Gates

The reason you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines.
Bill Gates

The two areas that are changing... are information technology and medical technology. Those are the things that the world will be very different 20 years from now than it is today.
Bill Gates

The U.S. couldn't even get rid of Saddam Hussein. And we all know that the EU is just a passing fad. They'll be killing each other again in less than a year. I'm sick to death of all these fascist lawsuits.
Bill Gates

There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no-one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft.
Bill Gates

There are some things that we are always thinking about. For example, when will speech recognition be good enough for everybody to use that? And we have made a lot more progress this year on that. I think we will surprise people a bit on how well we will do on our speech recognition.
Bill Gates

There is a certain responsibility that accrued to me when I got to this unexpected position.
Bill Gates

There's always a tricky issue when you get into stolen material or pornography. The laws for online publishing the same as for print-based publishing, where if you're hosting certain types of things and somebody notifies you about that.
Bill Gates

We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.
Bill Gates

We've got to put a lot of money into changing behavior.
Bill Gates

What we're really after is simply that people acquire a legal license for Windows for each computer they own before they move on to Linux or Sun Solaris or BSD or OS/2 or whatever.
Bill Gates

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.
Bill Gates

When you want to do your homework, fill out your tax return, or see all the choices for a trip you want to take, you need a full-size screen.
Bill Gates

Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.
Bill Gates

Windows 2000 already contains features such as the human discipline component, where the PC can send an electric shock through the keyboard if the human does something that does not please Windows.
Bill Gates

You see, antiquated ideas of kindness and generosity are simply bugs that must be programmed out of our world. And these cold, unfeeling machines will show us the way.
Bill Gates

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Bill Gates

matthew
December 10th, 2005, 03:55 AM
lovechild's quote was so good I thought I would add a couple more of the thoughtful variety:

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge
-Charles Darwin

Nearly all men can withstand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
-Abraham Lincoln

EDIT: while I wrote this the flood gates opened (or was that the Gates Flood began). Is it just me or is his grammar rather suspect? Sometimes he has very interesting things to say but I find myself distracted by the wording, the sentence structure and the cadence. Sigh, it's the curse of being literate. Thanks, McMuffy for the contribution!

mcmuffy
December 10th, 2005, 04:02 AM
while I wrote this the flood gates opened (or was that the Gates Flood began)


You sir should be on stage :)

matthew
December 10th, 2005, 04:12 AM
You sir should be on stage :):)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts, ...
-William Shakespeare, As You Like It (I believe Act 2...)

Dr. Nick
December 10th, 2005, 04:40 AM
:)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts, ...
-William Shakespeare, As You Like It (I believe Act 2...)
Reminds me of a song

All the world’s indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another’s audience
Outside the gilded cage


-Artist : Rush
-Title : Limelight

xequence
December 10th, 2005, 04:56 AM
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts, ...
-William Shakespeare, As You Like It (I believe Act 2...)

All the world’s indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another’s audience
Outside the gilded cage
- Rush, Limelight ( Lines 24-28 )

Lovechild
December 10th, 2005, 05:11 AM
Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most
- Ozzy Osborne

And now to spread the cleese:

If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you more open to my ideas. And if I can persuade you to laugh at the particular point I make, by laughing at it you acknowledge its truth.
- John Cleese

I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.
- John Cleese

The English contribution to world cuisine - the chip.
- John Cleese

xequence
December 10th, 2005, 05:19 AM
Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most
- Ozzy Osborne

I like that one =P

Lux Perpetua
December 10th, 2005, 05:25 AM
The question of whether computers can think is rather like the question of whether submarines can swim.
.

matthew
December 10th, 2005, 05:44 AM
Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most
- Ozzy Osborne Crazy, but that's how it goes
Millions of people living as foes
Maybe it's not too late
To learn how to love and give up on hate
- Ozzy Osborne (Crazy Train)

@xequence: I like the new avatar, bro.

matthew
December 10th, 2005, 06:28 AM
Speaking of quotes, this was released today and is applicable:

2005 - The IT year in quotes (http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/12/09/HNyearinquotes_1.html)

rjwood
December 10th, 2005, 07:36 AM
Just had to......

"I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep on the soil of a friend." —George W. Bush, on visiting Denmark, Washington D.C., June 29, 2005

I was going to say he's a piece of work, but that might not translate too well. Is that all right, if I call you a 'piece of work'?" —George W. Bush to Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg, Washington, D.C., June 20, 2005

"It's totally wiped out. ... It's devastating, it's got to be doubly devastating on the ground." —George W. Bush, turning to his aides while surveying Hurricane Katrina flood damage from Air Force One , Aug. 31, 2005

"Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled." --explaining his plan to save Social Security, Tampa, Fla., Feb. 4, 2005

alot more here http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/bushquotes/a/topbushisms2005.htm

wondering_jew
December 10th, 2005, 12:04 PM
A few from Robert Heinlein that I specifically enjoy...

"Being intelligent isn't a felony, but most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor"


"A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits."


"Its better to copulate than never."

Stormy Eyes
December 10th, 2005, 04:25 PM
"When you want to get results, the best motives to use are fun, profit, and revenge." --Isaac Magnin