Old MIT Quotes file

'You know my motto: Forgive and uh... the other thing.'


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Bus error: passengers dumped


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COBOL programmers understand why women hate periods.


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One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero,
they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.
    	--Robert Firth


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The C Programming Language: combines the flexibility of assembly language
with the power of assembly language.


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The Law of Software Development and Envelopment at MIT:
Every program in development at MIT expands until it can read mail.


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The problem with engineers is that they cheat in order to get results.

The problem with mathematicians is that they work on toy problems in order
to get results.

The problem with program verifiers is that they cheat on toy problems in
order to get results.


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Anderson's Law:

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you
looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.


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Cole's law:
   Thinly sliced cabbage.


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"I'm a Leo.  Leos don't believe in this astrology stuff."
    	-- Tom Neff


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"No problem is too big it can't be run away from"
    	-- Linus


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"What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that
they are extreme, but that they are intolerant.  The evil is not what
they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents."
    	-- Robert F. Kennedy


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"If we do not succeed, then we face the risk of failure."
    	-- Dan Quayle, Vice-President of the United States


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"Laundry increases exponentially in the number of children."
    	-- Miriam Robbins


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"Aging is bad, but consider the alternative."
    	-- anon


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"Only a mediocre man is always at his best."
    	-- W. Somerset Maugham


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"Some would sooner die than think.  In fact, they often do."
    	-- Bertrand Russell


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"Waiter, there's no fly in my soup!"
    	-- Kermit the frog


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"Oh boy, virtual memory! Now I'm gonna make myself a REALLY BIG ram disk!"
    	-- lennox@shire.hw.stratus.com


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"The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a
 soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with
 an idea." 
    	-- _The Wizardry Compiled_ by Rick Cook


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"Never put off until run time what you can do at compile time."
    	--  David Gries, in "Compiler Construction for Digital 
    	    Computers", circa 1969.


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God is real unless declared integer.
    	-- Allen W. Sherzer (aws@vax3.UUCP)


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File names are infinite in length where infinity is set to 255 characters.
    	-- Peter Collinson, "The Unix File System"


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"This is a one line proof...if we start sufficiently far to the left."
    	-- peter@cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com


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It has been discovered that C++ provides a remarkable facility for concealing
the trivial details of a program - such as where its bugs are.


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1) There was a young girl from Peru	2) There was a young man from Verdun
   Whose limericks stopped at line two    
    	-- Martin Gardner "Aha, Gotcha!" 


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"MOM, CAN I SET FIRE TO MY BED MATTRESS?"   "No, Calvin."
"CAN I RIDE MY TRICYCLE ON THE ROOF?"       "No, Calvin."
"Then can I have a cookie?"                 "No, Calvin."
("She's on to me.")


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James Bond asked his ATT rep for a source license to "kill".


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"That particular mistake will not be repeated.  There are plenty of
 mistakes left that have not yet been used." 
    	-- Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)


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"The I.S.O. standard unit of female pulchritude is the milli-helen.  This
is the amount of beauty capable of causing the launching of a single ship."


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C++ -- The language in which only friends can access your private members.


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    A Unix saleslady, Lenore
    enjoys work, but she likes the beach more.
    She found a good way
    to combine work and play:
    She sells C-shells by the seashore.


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There was a young poet named Dan,
whose poetry would never scan,
when told this was so, `
He said, Yes I know,
It's because I try to fit every possible sylable into the last line that I can.


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There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and BSD UNIX.
We don't believe this to be a coincidence.


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"To be or nut^H^H^H -- sh^Gt, how do I delete..^D^D^D Oh No Oh NO^D^D^D -- How
do I get out of this thing anyway (mumble mumble)

Bus error (core dumped)


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Arthur C. Clarke's Law :

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.


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Galbraith's Law of Human Nature:

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is 
no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.


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    One disk to rule them all,
    One disk to bind them,
    One disk to hold the files
    And in the darkness grind 'em


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There has been opposition to every innovation in the history of man, with the
possible exception of the sword.
    	-- Benjamin Dana


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When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible,
he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he
is very probably wrong.
        -- Arthur C. Clarke


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OLTION'S COMPLETE, UNABRIDGED HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE

Bang!      ...crumple.
        -- Jery Oltion


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Science is not a sacred cow. Science is a horse. Don't worship it. Feed it.
        -- Aubrey Eben


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All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as
video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal
value.
        -- Carl Sagan


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If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
        -- Kurt Vonnegut


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Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
        -- H. G. Wells


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'I've gone to hundreds of fortune-tellers' parlors, and have been told
thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready
to arrest her.'
        -- New York City Detective


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I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man.
It is us.
        -- Konrad Lorenz


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"I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to
 waste any of mine running around doing exercises."
        -- Neil Armstrong


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"If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known
 will go to heaven, and very, very few persons."
        -- James Thurber


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"It was revealed this week that the Contras are breaking up, because one of
 them is dating Yoko."
    	-- Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update


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"Not *the* Jane Harrington? Jane 'Bury Me in a Y-shaped Coffin' Harrington?"
    	-- Edmund Blackadder


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"They're filming Rocky V now.  This one's being billed as `Rocky's Greatest
Challenge', so I guess there's an IQ test involved."
	-- Jay Leno


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"It's silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The
 truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins,
 traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons."
    	-- Henry Miller


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SELECTIONS from ECLECTIC MUSIC SURVEY 4: Johann Sebastian Bach

"Great composer, but hasn't written much lately."
    	-- Richard Caley


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SELECTIONS from ECLECTIC MUSIC SURVEY 4: Joan Armatrading

She should get more credit than Tracy Chapman, but she's not always 
politically correct, and if there's one thing the music industry can't stand
it's a talented black female folk/rocker who is NOT politically correct."
    	-- Anton C Shepps


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"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
 looks like work."
    	-- Thomas Edison


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'And so the obvious phallic symbolism of Wolverine's claws provides a
 counterpoint to the Oedipal blindness motif of Cyclops' ruby visor.'
	-- Carl Rigney


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If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a chance of being a
prophet.
	-- Isaac Bashevis Singer


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Artificial Intelligence: the art of making computers that behave like the
ones in movies.
	-- Bill Bulko


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"I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go
 down and meet them with baseball bats."
	-- Woody Allen, on the KKK


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Trouble: Charles Manson.  *REAL* Trouble: His evil twin.
	-- Mister Boffo


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"Remember folks.  Street lights timed for 35 mph are also timed for 70 mph."
	-- Jim Samuels


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I braved the contempt of my friends last week and ventured out to see
"Bambi", the Disney rerelease that is proving to be a hit once again in the
box office. I was looking forward to a gentle, soothing, late afternoon
relief from the Washington Summer. Instead I was traumatized. As a
psycho-sexual return to the horrors of early adolescence, it couldn't be
more effective. For the first half-hour, you're lulled into an agreeable
sense of security and comfort. Birds twitter; small rabbits turn out to be
great conversationalists. Pop is what Senator Moynihan would describe as an
absent father, but Mom's there to make you feel OK in the odd thunderstorm.
You make great friends, fool around on the ice, discover the meadow,
generally mellow out. Then, without any particular warning, your mom gets
shot, your voice breaks, huge growths start appearing on your head, and
your peers start heading off into the clover with the apparent intention of
having sex. Next thing you know, the forest burns down. If I were still
eight, I think I'd prefer _Rambo III_."
	-- Townsend Davis


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MS-DOS isn't dead, it just smells that way.
	-- Henry Spencer


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If at first you don't succeed, you are running about average.
	-- Bill Cosby


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The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody
appreciates how difficult it was.
	-- Walt West


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Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.
    	-- Mark Twain


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If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
    	-- Gloria Steinhem


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'I regret to say that we of the F.B.I. are powerless to act in cases of
oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate
commerce.'
	-- J. Edgar Hoover 


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- 'My husband commits an inconceivable act of perversion with a barnyard
   animal, and it's not central to my case?!'
- 'Not in California.'
    	-- Arnie Becker discusses marital infidelities on L.A. LAW


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In regards to Oral Roberts' claim that God told him that he would die
unless he received $20 million by March, God's lawyers have stated that
their client has not spoken with Roberts for several years. Off the record,
God has stated that `if I had wanted to ice the little toad, I would have
done it a long time ago.'
    	-- Dennis Miller, SNL News


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"None of you understand.  I'm not locked up in here with you.  YOU'RE
 locked up in here with ME."
    	-- Rorschach sets people straight.  WATCHMEN 6


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A good USENET motto would be:
    a. "Together, a strong community."
    b. "Computers R Us."
    c. "I'm sick of programming, I think I'll just fuck around for a while 
        on company time."


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Seen in TV Guide, describing the Star Trek episode _Amok_Time_:
   "Mr. Spock succumbs to a powerful mating urge and
    nearly kills Captain Kirk."


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When anyone says `theoretically,' they really mean `not really.'"
	-- David Parnas


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I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve
immortality through not dying."
	-- Woody Allen


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- "Can you drive a 6-inch spike through a board with your penis?"
- "Uh, not right now."
- "Tsk.  A girl has to have her standards."
    	-- Deborah Foreman to Val Kilmer in "Real Genius"


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"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."
	-- Wernher von Braun


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The question if a computer can think is as interesting as the question if
a submarine can swim.


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Black music is in, Black culture is in, but Black *people*   will never be in."
    	-- Kyle Baker, Why I Hate Saturn


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Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
    	-- Joseph Campbell


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My goal is a simple one: To live forever -- or die trying.


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"Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of
 government! Supreme executive power is derived by a mandate from the masses,
 not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!"


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I like having a machine called 'elvis' on the network because that way, I
can say 'ping elvis' and have it come back with 'elvis is alive'."


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We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to
none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball
countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like
it.
    	-- Dave Barry


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I'd rather that a bigot mistake me for a lesbian than that a lesbian mistake
me for a bigot.
    	-- Tovah Hollander


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Q: How is a book by Alan Dean Foster like a (void) function?

A: Neither returns anything of value.


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The most important thing in life is to love someone. The second most
important thing in life is to have someone love you. The third most
important thing is to have the first two happen at the same time.
    	-- Howie Schneider


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"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so
certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
    	-- Bertrand Russell
 
"How come he didn't put `I think' at the end of it?" 
    	-- James P. Hogan


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Jesus Saves -- Johnson scores on the rebound.


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Heisenburg may have slept here.


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Santa's elves are just a bunch of subordinate Clauses.


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Recursive, adj.; see Recursive


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C Code.  C Code Run.  Run, Code, RUN! PLEASE!!!!


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Jesus rose from the dead and the apostles came unto him saying "How's Elvis"


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"They told me I was gullible . . . and I BELIEVED them!"


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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny ..."
	-- Isaac Asimov 


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When I was young, my family bought a color TV. Our neigbors, who were
poorer, had only a black-and-white set. They bought a piece of cellophane,
shaded from red through yellow to blue, and taped it over their screen, so
they could claim that they had a color TV, too.  Now there's Windows 3.1.


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2 + 2 = 5  for sufficiently large values of 2.


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I know you're supposed to take life one day at a time -- but lately several
days have attacked me at once.


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In the immortal words of the captain of the Titantic, 'Where did all this
fucking ice come from?'


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A friend is someone you call to help you move. A best friend is someone you
call to help you move... a body.


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We have the most [thorough] test guy in the world... [I showed him this
program and he asked,] 'but Rob, what if time runs backward?'"


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"Programming graphics in X is like finding sqrt(pi) using Roman numerals."
	-- Henry Spencer


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'My Country right or wrong' is like saying 'My Mother drunk or sober.' "
	-- G. K. Chesterton


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- What is your name?
- "Sir Brian of Bell."
- What is your quest?"
- "I seek the Holy Grail."
- What are four lowercase letters that are not legal flag arguments to
  the Berkeley UNIX version of `ls'?"
- "I, er.... AIIIEEEEEE!"
	-- Mark-Jason Dominus


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It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had
been dead for two years.
	-- Tom Lehrer


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"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away".
        -- Philip K. Dick


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"Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do."
        -- Bertrand Russell


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"Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without
 any proof."
        -- Ashley Montague


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"The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and
 fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are
 drifting side by side to our common doom."
        -- Clarence Darrow


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"Puritanism -- The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
        -- H. L. Mencken


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"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the
 point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
 The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality."
        -- George Bernard Shaw


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If I have not seen farther, it is because giants were standing on my
shoulders.
    	-- Anonymous, quoted in the GNU Awk manual


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One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast
to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of
scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and
dull, but also just stupid."
	-- J. D. Watson, THE DOUBLE HELIX


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"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
    	-- THE SIMPSONS


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Sic Biscuitus Disintegrat.
    	-- Adrian Ogden


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I keep hearing that Jesus Christ is coming, but nobody knows his tour dates.
    	-- Michael Lucas


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The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
    	-- Bertrand Russell


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'God does not play dice with the universe.'
    	-- Albert Einstein


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'Albert, stop telling God what to do.'
    	-- Niels Bohr


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Lies, damned lies and user documentation.


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"make lots of money",  "enjoy the work",  "operate within the law":  choose 2
    	-- Brian Anderson


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The ugliest code I ever saw was the junk I wrote two months ago. The
greatest code I ever saw is the stuff I'm writing today. This statement
will still be true two months from now.
    	-- John Norstad, Disinfectant author


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"My uncle has a country place that no-one knows about,
 he says it used to be a farm before he mowed the lawn..."


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"For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this
 is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I
 can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I
 believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see
 that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I
 don't like it."  -- W.H. Auden, A CERTAIN WORLD


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I think, therefore I thwim.


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When I die, I'd like to go peacefully.  In my sleep.  Like my grandfather.
Not screaming, like the passengers in his car...


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I think we're in for a bad spell of wether.


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                    Why I Work: A short essay
                          I like food.
                            The end.       (seen on a greeting card)


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If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the
computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per
gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
         -- Robert X.  Cringely


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"The many other people who have given of their time and 'essence' to
ARPAnet, CSnet, BITnet and USEnet are fellow travellers of a
brotherhood which has no name or formal organization. You can easily
join it: simply adopt a pet-project that allows you to multiply the
fruits of your labours; nearly effortlessly to share with thousands of
others; the miracle of computer networks is there to be exploited for
what it can do best: sharing."  -- Werner Uhrig,
werner@rascal.ics.utexas.edu


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"Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least
one instruction -- from which, by induction, one can deduce that every
program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work."
(Author Unknown)


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"If the idea of a protocol behaving like a rabid, diseased sex-crased
bunny rabbit appeals to you, AppleTalk is for you."  -- John Kennedy,
comp.dcom.sys.cisco


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Jesus not only saves, but He also frequently makes backups.


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"We're in a de fecto relationship."
"Don't you mean de facto?"
"No, de fecto. It's not working very well."


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I used to drive a Heisenberg Uncertainty car, but I could never read the 
speedometer without getting lost.


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EB: Baldrick, your brain is like the four headed,  
    man-eating haddock fish beast of Aberdeen
 B: In what way? 
EB: It doesn't exist    


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	First Job of Government:  Protect people from govermment.
	Second Job of Government: Protect people from each other
 It must *never* be the job of government to protect people from themselves.


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"Here's a horrible thought: You know how dumb the
average person is? Well, half the human race is even dumber than that..."


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"A distributed system is one in which I cannot get something done
because a machine I've never heard of is down"   --Leslie Lamport


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"Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history 
of the computer industry for the past decade as a massive attempt
to keep up with Apple." Byte 12/94


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"The other major kind of computer is the "Apple," which I do not recommend,
because it is a wuss-o-rama new-age computer that you basically just plug in
and use. This means you don't get to participate in the most entertaining
aspect of computer owning, which is trying to get the computer to work."

- Dave Barry 2/6/94 


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WINDOWS95: It's like upgrading from Reagan to Bush.


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Picard is a replicant.


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"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"


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"I'm a paranoid agnostic. I doubt the existence of God, but I'm sure there is
some force, somewhere, working against me." --Marc Maron


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Overcome by lust, Data sodomizes the ATM machine.


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Time paradoxes will have given me a headache. 


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Give a man a fish: feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish: feed him for life.
           Teach a hundred men to fish: empty the lake of fish.


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 "It wasn't her fault. She suffers from UTKPS."
 "What's that ?"
 "Unfortunate Tendency to Kill People Syndrome."


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OJ's WWW address is http://////////


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"Hey, imp!" shouted Vlad, the imp hailer.


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 I love Kubrick's movies, but I never could get anywhere with his Cube.


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 "It's days like this remind me of my Daddy's last words.."
 "What were they ?"
 "Careful, son, that thing's loaded."


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"I have an inferiority complex, but it isn't a very good one."


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"The meek shall inherit the Earth, if that's all right with you."


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Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good;             

and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.                                 
       -- Dick Brandon


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"The light at the end of the tunnel may be nothing more
   than an idiot with a match."