"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom." -Albert Einstein "Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good Fantasy." -Stephen R. Lasky, Ph.D. "You can't cry at every funeral when you live next to a cemetery." -Anon "Knowing that Macromedia Director is a great product that does exactly what you want, without knowing that its MSRP is approximately half the GNP, is worthless." -Peter T. Prunka "One goldfish in a tank is worth ten shaved cats with fins stapled to them in another tank of approximately the same size." -Dave King "I only tell the jokes, I don't explain them! If someone doesn't get it, I laugh even louder." -Jimmie McWhirt "Gee, I rather liked those films while growing up! Hasn't affected me at all 'cept for the waking up screaming in the middle of the night and the self body painting with ketchup! Oh well... " -John Dazye "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." -Albert Einstein "Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling -- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user." -Niklaus Wirth "I was chained upside-down and sprayed with whipped cream just like everybody else! Remember the good old days when they used to let you play with the bears at the park! *sigh* I miss them days!" -John Dazye "Hmmm, last time anyone tried to explain anything Kynn did, all concerned had to be physically restrained and medicated. But I'm feeling muuuuuuuch better now." -Jay Morris "The bulk of the [BSD UN*X] code was written at Berkeley, much of it by long-haired computer geeks, complete with bad complexions and pocket protectors. Many Master's Degrees were built on what was to follow." -BSD FAQ "I am not willing to prostitute my code to please a shitty client." -MegaZone "Thank you for using Fred, the official HWG Rock! We hope you enjoy hitting him against your head!" -Kynn Bartlett "The views contained herein in no way reflect the views of any actual persons, living, dead, or in Kansas. Nor do they reflect the views of my dog, my shoe, or my stereo. In fact, I disavow the existence of my views at all times, including Sundays, from 7-7." -Richard Christiansen "If NASA had gone directly from the Saturn V rocket to a practical hyperdrive, we might have something to which to compare the 3400's breathtaking leap forward in raw speed over that of previous PowerBooks. But NASA didn't, so we are left only with superlatives to describe the new portable's performance." -Andrew Gore (MacUser) "The only 'mood' music on web pages creates for me is annoyance and rage." -MegaZone "Harvey, all the words are important. I don't throw in extra extraneous redundant phrases just to pad out my sentences by extending the length of what I'm trying to say for no reason at all. Well, not often." -Kynn Bartlett "I don't make this stuff up; I just read what's written." -Duif Calvin "I skimmed this quickly and saw 'Mr. Bartlett this' and 'Mr. Bartlett that,' and couldn't figure out what the hell my dad had done. I think Ms. Calvin is the only person who calls me 'Mr. Bartlett.'" -Kynn Bartlett "Now it looks like Kynn, of all people, has gone to the Dark Side and is defending the system. The end is nigh." -MegaZone "The Spice Girls are like what happens when you put Wilson Philips and Ace of Base in a blender together. Heh, come to think of it, that would probably be a really nifty trick, not to mention solution." -Steve Miller "Alterna-bands doing 'aren't we *so* ironic and post-modern' covers of disco-crap. This sort of musical revisionism seems to be an 'industrial' favourite. Why? Does taking a shite-awful record and giving it steamshovel drums and 'invade Poland now!' vocals make it any less horrible? No." -John Hawkes-Reed "There's no problem so large it can't be solved by killing the user off, deleting their files, closing their account, and reporting their REAL earnings to the IRS." -Simon Travaglia (Bastard Operator From Hell) "I died. Of course, a true BOFH considers this not really as dying, but more of going home for the holidays. Five seconds later, I'm getting the upside of 15Kv across the nipples. (These ambulance guys sure know how to party)." -Simon Travaglia "I'm really starting to worry about the number of account breakins we've been having recently.... The manager isn't though. His main concern appears to be the number of computer-related fatalities on campus. Funny world, isn't it?" -Simon Travaglia "Since the last update, I've flown nine helicopter rescues, done the rough plumbing on eleven new low-income houses for Habitat For Humanity, taught elderly sightless nuns how to program in C++ and helped organize their recent successful IPO, which netted their orphanage over $180,000,000 in paper assets; I had to drive my Mom to a dental appointment once, I think." -Andy Ihnatko "Good thing no one tried anything with me; I would have had to get all New Yawk on their ass. Don't mess with the Hello Kitty Ninja." -Janette Holdorff "Hell isn't as bad as it's cracked up to be. N-n-n-no no, the thing about Heaven is that Heaven is for people who like the sort of things that go on in Heaven. Like, uh, well, singing, talking to God, nurturing pot plants.... Whereas Hell, on the other hand, is for people who like the other sorts of things: adultery... pillage... torture... those areas...." -The Black Adder "A lot of people say to me, 'Why did you kill Christ?' 'I dunno... it was one of those parties, got out of hand, you know.' 'We killed him because he didn't want to become a doctor, that's why we killed him.'" -Lenny Bruce "Given that he was a feminine (i.e., peaceful, nurturant, passive) man in an age of aggressive manly men, I'd wager Jesus was a big homo. Mary Magdelene was his fag hag. It's obvious once you figure out how to read between the lines of 2000 years of careful homophobic editing." -Kraig M. D. Blackwelder "I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts." -Orson Welles "I do not engage in censorship of that kind. I prefer the intimidation sort of censorship, the 'speak up and I will make a fool out of you.'" -Chris Petro "Progress is impossible without voicing up... and those who dare not speak their minds cannot change anything." -A. "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." -Gandhi "The world is moving so fast these days that he who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it." -Elbert Hubbard "The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom 'I think, therefore I am.' Americans do not think, yet they are." -Julius Evola "Having an opinion is a necessary - but not sufficient - condition for expressing it." -Patrick Wiseman "There's a fine line between innovation and bastardization, but it's usually up to history to decide which is which." -Tarik Dozier "Mean-spirited comments or generalized nastiness aren't welcome in VRFORUM. VRFORUM is a friendly online environment, and we'll kill you if you don't believe us." -VRForum "What we do not understand we do not possess." -Goethe "The two words 'information' and 'communication' are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through." -Sydney J. Harris "When you run into someone who is disagreeable to others, you may be sure he is uncomfortable with himself; the amount of pain we inflict upon others is directly proportional to the amount we feel within us." -Sydney J. Harris "Only some of us can learn by other people's mistakes. The rest of us have to be the other people." -A. "Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity." -General George S. Patton, Jr. "Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts." -Ernest Hemingway "And by the way... family emergencies do not occur when we schedule them unfortunately." -Cindy Svec "Cincinnati in general is just a waste of good land these days. I think we should level the whole place and try again." -Nicodemus "Endian Little Hate We" -Connectix Virtual PC team "It is possible that an unmentioned rude-crude censorware package is abruptly terminating the connection. But then again it is also possible that unmentioned unicorns, dancing on the Internet link, are doing the same thing." -Harold A. Driscoll "I don't pretend to have all the answers. I don't pretend to even know what the questions are. Hey, where am I?" -Jack Handey "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." -Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949 "'Cheer up; it may never happen...' got me the Prozac campaign. We're launching it this week. I want _huge_ billboards: 'Depressed? Don't be. Unhappiness is an unnatural state.'" -Edina Monsoon, "Absolutely Fabulous" "When someone shares a *stupid* idea I reserve the right to stomp it like a narc at a biker rally." -MegaZone "Men despise great projects when they do not feel themselves capable of great successes." -M. de Vauvenargues "Now that I've stated my opinion, I will press my delete key. But you'll have to do more than be a sarcastic little snot to shut me up." -Jim Davis "'Stupidity != ignorance' In short ignorance is fine - we're all ignorant about something. Ignorance can be cured with learning. Stupidity is having the the data, being shown a better way time and time again, and still insisting on doing it another way. I'm not sure that can be cured." -MegaZone "Oh yah, I also remember the time when I got car-jacked while I stopped for a stop sign. I got so mad that I gave him the finger and drove off. He was so surprised that he forgot to use the gun to shoot at me. Amateurs... some people can't get anything right. That's why this great country of ours is Shot to Hell... and people wonder why jobs are going overseas..." -Reuben Chew "In any case, mine are BLUE and thus quite different. In fact, they're officially known as 'Microsoft Blue Monkeys from Bill Gates' Butt 97 for Windows 95.'" -Kynn Bartlett "I can't afford to lose my mind at work; they don't like it when I run through the halls singing 'The martians are coming the martians are coming!'" -Chris Petro "Most hippies I've run into (including my parents and my aunt and uncle) are decent and tolerant people, if a little too genial for my taste. And if nothing else, people who hold that 'Love your brother, man' attitude are easily manipulated and taken advantage of. :) (Kidding. Er, sort of.) Besides, they make a mean burrito." -Rachel Pollock (Lady Bathory) "We don't have all these different types of teeth in our heads for nothing. I feel no guilt and no shame about being omnivorous. I'll eat anything that doesn't eat me first." -Glenn R. Perye (Macross) "We were talking about the current thread of discussion and decided that vegetarianism is very goth. 'I like to eat my food while it's still alive,' [says] Sparrow, laughing evilly, listening for the scream from that poor apple..." -Sparrow "Please note that i am by no means slamming egotistical misanthropes. I consider myself to be one (FTMP)." -Rachel Pollock (Lady Bathory) "Whoa, pardon my obscenity... I was momentarily possessed by the spirit of a gothy bad-ass." -Sara Tiger (Miss Bang) "Besides, what does it matter in a court case whether or not you have your nipples pierced? I don't see how that makes ANY difference to how you do your job unless you show up to court with miniature silver gavels swinging from the chains..." -Andrew Matthews ($T.&REUX, KSC) "If the results of thinking were predictable, then one wouldn't need to do it now would one?" -Chris Petro "To use your other examples, someone who dresses in black and is a computer geek who picks the raisins out of raisin bran while playing Vampire may be a Goth, but also may not." -Chris Derrick "I have gone to get myself. If I return before I get back, hold me here, because it's important I see myself when I get back before I get confused." -A. "There's a saying - 'the customer is always right.' If someone hires me to do a site, and wants 64 frames on screen, each one a different shade of orange with a 2MB rotating peanut, and the whole thing playing sound bites whenever you move the mouse, I'll recommend against it, explain that it's not a good idea, but hey - if that's what they really want, so be it." -Allen Gould "We wake up giggling in the Motel 6 room; a movie called The Arrival is on; Charlie Sheen is acting circles around people just with his sweat alone." -Rose Marshack "Plastic surgery covers a lot of territory that _isn't_ cosmetic. For instance, when some oh-so-depressed quantum goth slices their wrists in a fit of woe, and they actually manage to damage themselves, but not to actually _off_ themselves, it is a plastic surgeon that reattaches the tendons and shit so that they can continue to masturbate themselves." -Chris Petro "Those who would expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it." -Thomas Paine "Then, suppose about 30% of the documents are converted to HTML3, and 70% are still Mozilla'd. Suddenly, Frisky Grafix, Inc. comes out with their Hot New Browser with its own formatting extensions called EHTML: the Extra-Hyper Text Markup Language. All text elements are animated! Look at the bullets dance in that unordered list! It's Netscape on crack." -Gerald Oskoboiny "I would like to work for quirky companies which employs people with purple hair, running around with panty-hose on their heads screaming 'SQUID! SQUID!'" -Reuben Chew "The point? The community is hardly dead. And the usual advice applies: anyone who wants more signal and less noise should generate more signal, not just complain about the noise. As I like to say, it's easy to hit the 'Delete' key, but my keyboard has no 'Create' key." -Tim May "I want to know God's thoughts... the rest are details." -Albert Einstein "Every once in a while the body politic catches a clue, and manages to do something with it before it leaks out on the pavement." -Chris Petro "As Web page authors, we can reasonably expect browsers to comply with the standards, however we can't expect them to be perfect about doing so. Where to draw the line is an interesting engineering decision." -Harold A. Driscoll "Yes... if your child feeds the VCR oatmeal, that's an accident and a mistake and it's covered. However, if YOU feed the VCR oatmeal, that's stupidity and you should know better so you're not covered. Any questions?" -Mr. Spaun "Remember... if you were born in the seventeenth century, you wouldn't have to Turtle Wax the minivan." -Richard Kinney (Waxy) "Rien n'est beau que le vrai." -Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux "I stand condemned before the bar of my own reason." -Emma Goldman "While I'm fully aware that money can't buy happiness, I wouldn't mind being known as 'that melancholy guy who drives the red Lamborghini Diablo.'" -George Olson "'Oppositive'? Oh, my. I've been working 61 hours straight, in two languages, and obviously the letters are starting to party on their own." -Duif Calvin "The health benefits of having a waitress call you 'Hon' cannot be overstressed. Doctors agree that hearing this simple word from your waitstaff at least three times over the course of a meal aids in digestion, increases your T-cell count thus bolstering your body's autoimmune system, and is an effective antidote against that to which the medical community has applied the technical term 'What Ails Ya.'" -Andy Ihnatko "I know all of those words, but the paragraph makes no sense." -Robert Hood "The Nazarene carpenter named Jesus probably did exist, and he probably claimed to be the Son of God (many people today make the same claim)." -Adam Thrasher "Incidentally, something for which no evidence exists is not necessarily false. Two thousand years ago it was believed that the Earth was flat due to the complete lack of evidence to the contrary. But they were wrong. It was round. Maybe your God does exist. Maybe the Islamic god exists. Maybe Buddhism is the way to go. Maybe the Hindus are right. Maybe dogs are our masters. But, I'm not going to buy any of it until I see some proof." -Adam Thrasher "Notice that as computers are becoming easier and easier to use, suddenly there's a big market for 'Dummies' books. Cause and effect, or merely an ironic juxtoposition of unrelated facts?" -A. "When is the last time the law kept you from killing someone? (It has stopped me once, but I am prone to getting a little excited)." -Chris Petro "That whole romanticism of death! Anybody who's ever experienced death firsthand could tell you there's nothing romantic about it." -Robert Smith "What better way to deter a rapist than to kick his ass?" -John VerBurg "If I walk through Cabrini Green carrying a clear plastic bag full of hundred dollar bills and wearing only a leather thong and a ball gag, I am not saying 'rape me, beat the sh*t out of me, and steal my money,' nor am I breaking any laws. True, I may be displaying poor judgement...." -Tarik Dozier "Could you imagine losing a whole gigabyte of data at once? Wouldn't that just make you storm out of the house with a big rubber mallet looking for baby ducks to squish?" -Andy Ihnatko "That which does not kill me makes me even more fucking pissed off." -Clifford Low "Law 6: When forced to compromise, ask for more." -Peter's Laws: The Creed of the Sociopathic Obsessive Compulsive "Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom." -Baha'u'llah "Leaving that for the moment, I could truly care less if an artist is pompous, a drug user, or likes to look at nude pictures of adolescent giraffes in his spare time... but I will not pay him to spit in my face." -Icarus "The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle, complimentary way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before." -F. Scott Fitzgerald "Fneh! Myah! Myah! Where're your miracles now, Moses?" -Andrew Matthews ($T.&REUX,KSC) "Actually, the only two things I knew were in there for certain were a short-story I wrote right after reading Douglas Adams for the first time (Douglas, if sometime in 1979 you suddenly doubled over in pain there in the tub and couldn't figure out whether a billion souls had just cried out in anguish, or some idiotic seventh-grader had finished writing a lame ripoff of Hitchhiker's, well, let me just offer a belated apology), and the evidence of my monthlong odyssey to try to like poetry (of which the less said, the better). And I'd be pleased if those two works were completely wiped out of existance." -Andy Ihnatko "Instead, I went with 3.5" magneto-optical. I tried this stuff out when it was first introduced a few years ago, and damn did I have a hard time trying to get this media to fail. You can magnetize it, you can heat it, you can throw it against a wall; you can jostle it, you can dance naked around it, you can read Jackie Collins books at it: and still, the cart will mount." -Andy Ihnatko "...I sucked on it, I enjoyed it; it's over." -Inga Hoffman (out of context, and I'm not tellin') "No, we're not there yet. When I was your age, we never got there, and we were grateful for it." -A. "They're your fears; they're your terrors, and they live in a cave in the pit of your psyche and they all are named 'Dave.'" -Maxx's dead fish in a bowl made of glass (The Maxx)