Pithy Quotes

Dr. Gabriel Robins Professor of Computer Science Department of Computer Science School of Engineering and Applied Science University of Virginia 85 Engineer's Way, P.O. Box 400740 Charlottesville, VA 22904-4740, USArobins@cs.virginia.edu www.cs.virginia.edu/robins Phone: (434) 249-0809 Office: 406 Rice Hall Gabe's Vitae / Resume (NIH Biosketch)

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/quotes.html

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."

- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

"His ignorance is encyclopedic"

- Abba Eban (1915-2002)

"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."

- Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

"Sex and religion are closer to each other than either might prefer."

- Saint Thomas More (1478-1535)

"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."

- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

"This book fills a much-needed gap."

- Moses Hadas (1900-1966) in a review

"The full use of your powers along lines of excellence."

- definition of "happiness" by John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."

- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

- Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

"Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right."

- Henry Ford (1863-1947)

"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

"There are no facts, only interpretations."

- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

- Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something."

- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)

"If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance."

- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

"We have art to save ourselves from the truth."

- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

"I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction."

- Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)

"I have nothing to declare except my genius."

- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) upon arriving at U.S. customs 1882

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."

- H. G. Wells (1866-1946)

"Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake a whole relationship."

- Sharon Stone

"If you are going through hell, keep going."

- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

"Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass; it's about learning to dance in the rain."

- Vivian Greene

"Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions."

- Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."

- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."

- Voltaire (1694-1778)

"He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death."

- H. H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916)

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

- Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell."

- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

"Black holes are where God divided by zero."

- Steven Wright

"I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it."

- Groucho Marx (1895-1977)

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true."

- James Branch Cabell

"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher."

- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

"An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered."

- Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."

- Umberto Eco

"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."

- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."

- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"Basically, I no longer work for anything but the sensation I have while working."

- Albert Giacometti (sculptor)

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) 

Gandhi "then you win"

"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life."

- Frank Zappa

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

- Antoine de Saint Exupery

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

"The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it's their fault."

- Henry Kissinger (1923-)

"I'll sleep when I'm dead."

- Warren Zevon (1947-2003)

"There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread."

- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it"

- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"

- Bumper Sticker

"God, please save me from your followers!"

- Bumper Sticker

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

"Wit is educated insolence."

- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

"My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher."

- Socrates (470-399 B.C.)

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

- Maya Angelou (1928-)

"Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me."

- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."

- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."

- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

"We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?"

- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."

- Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

"In any contest between power and patience, bet on patience."

- W.B. Prescott

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."

- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"What do you take me for, an idiot?"

- General Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), when a journalist asked him if he was happy

"I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon."

- Bill Hirst

"No one can earn a million dollars honestly."

- William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925)

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it."

- Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."

- Groucho Marx (1895-1977)

"Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater."

- Gail Godwin

"Behind every great fortune there is a crime."

- Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)

"I am not young enough to know everything."

- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same."

- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"The covers of this book are too far apart."

- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?"

- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"Hell is other people."

- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

"Happiness is good health and a bad memory."

- Ingrid Bergman (1917-1982)

"You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone."

- Al Capone (1899-1947)

"Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man."

- Professor Scott Elledge on his retirement from Cornell

"The cynics are right nine times out of ten."

- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it."

- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

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"Men are not disturbed by things, but the view they take of things."

- Epictetus (55-135 A.D.)

"What about things like bullets?"

- Herb Kimmel, Behavioralist, Professor of Psychology, upon hearing the above quote (1981)

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"Men have become the tools of their tools."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Servo-mechanism

"Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives."

- Abba Eban (1915-2002)

"To sit alone with my conscience will be judgment enough for me."

- Charles William Stubbs "We are not punished for our sins: we are punished by our sins."

"Sanity is a madness put to good uses."

- George Santayana (1863-1952)

"In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take."

- Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)

"Why don't you write books people can read?"

- Nora Joyce to her husband James (1882-1941) 
Charlie Chaplin entered a Chaplin look-alike contest and came in third.

"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."

- T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

"Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting."

- Karl Wallenda

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized."

- Sun Tzu

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

- Sir Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-1971)

"Hell is paved with good samaritans."

- William M. Holden
C.S. Lewis the hunted look

"The average person thinks he isn't."

- Father Larry Lorenzoni

"Heav'n hath no rage like love to hatred turn'd, Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd."

- William Congreve (1670-1729)
Hugo 

"I think it would be a good idea."

- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), when asked what he thought of Western civilization

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."

- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899

"Denial ain't just a river in Egypt."

- Mark Twain (1835-1910)

"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know."

- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."

- Tom Clancy

"Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame."

- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

"There is only one nature - the division into science and engineering is a human imposition, not a natural one. Indeed, the division is a human failure; it reflects our limited capacity to comprehend the whole."

- Bill Wulf

"Write drunk; edit sober."

- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

"I criticize by creation - not by finding fault."

- Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

"God gave men both a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough blood supply to run both at the same time."

- Robin Williams, commenting on the Clinton/Lewinsky affair

"For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing."

- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

"Pray, v.: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy."

- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."

- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial."

- Irvin S. Cobb

"I worship the quicksand he walks in."

- Art Buchwald

"We are not retreating - we are advancing in another Direction."

- General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964)

"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil, that takes religion."

- Steven Weinberg (1933-) 
Pascal

"Interesting - I use a Mac to help me design the next Cray."

- Seymoure Cray (1925-1996) when he was told that Apple Inc. had recently bought a Cray supercomputer to help them design the next Mac.

"I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need."

- Francois-Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues

"There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."

- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

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© The quotations collection on this Web page is copyright © 1994-2016 by Professor Gabriel Robins. Permission is hereby granted to anyone to make copies of this Web page, either in part or in its entirety, for any purpose whatsoever, including using any part of the collection above in published works, as long as Gabriel Robins is credited as the creator of this quotations collection and a Web link is included to this quotes Web page (i.e., in electronic or Web copies that use parts of this Web page, please link the citation/acknowledgement to Professor Gabriel Robins